❖ Version History ❖

November 17th, 2021
Alright. So, we’ve got this brilliant idea to bring together the game now for our next prototype: double sided ‘mini cards’. This will help us reduce how many items are needed to make the game, and it will make the flow of the game pieces a lot better too!

But… there is something else about this concept that we haven’t fully covered, a bit of a loose end that has arisen. With the change of the card sizes for the Phoenix Phases and the Tools, we must reconsider what the player is going to have as a play mat to organize all of their game pieces while playing!

The idea of the player mat was simple when the cards were tiny, because a 4″x6″ piece of material could easily hold all of the other cards in an organized fashion. But with the mini cards being nearly twice the size, this leads to a much messier table layout that now needs some help!

No need for stress though, because just as importantly as in our last discussion, this brainstorm is about to save us 100’s of pieces of card stock! The idea of expanding on the player mat lead to the brilliance of keeping track of a player’s wealth with a counter rather than using individual cards! Let’s get into what happened here and talk about the impact on Phoenix Farm:

The Critical Needs of the Player Mat

In Phoenix Farm, a player must constantly be juggling around assets of their farm alongside pieces of their wealth. They keep tools and phoenixes on their farm while also constantly negotiating an ever changing pile of currency (in this case, Phoenix Feathers).

In all of the previous iterations of Phoenix Farm leading up to this point in time, the Phoenix Feathers existed as a pile of playing cards, where each card represented x1 feather (kind of like a dollar bill).

As you can see in the image above (from well over a year earlier), each player keeps a little play mat where they manage all of these moving parts:

1. Up to x3 different birds, each with their own “Coop”
2. Up to x3 different tools, each with their own “Shed”
3. A pile of Feathers, which cannot exceed 12
4. A pile of Coins, which can have any number (21 total in game)

Ways that the Player Mat could be Improved:

1. A player could have a chart for tracking feathers (no longer needed as cards)
2. The layout of the board itself could be changed to accommodate larger cards.
3. The shop exchange rate could be added to the designs of the play mat.
4. Certain rules of the game could also appear on the mat… (like dice outcomes).

Knowing what I needed to include was useful… but there are also nearly endless combinations of how these details could be arranged. It was time for some serious brainstorming. To start, I began with some doodles on the feather counter existing alongside the Phoenix Coops and the Tool Sheds:

My second draft of the player mat was arguably exactly everything I wanted. It featured enough space for the feather counter to exist alongside the six necessary slots for a player to keep track of what they are managing for Phoenixes and Tools. It was a clean and functional design.

But…
This would also only be one side of the printed media. The card would also have a back side to play around with, and though designing a back side to the player mat may only sort of makes sense, there is some logic to this thought! Of course, anyone using a player mat to track information for the whole game would not be able to utilize the back side of the card during the game (as this would cause them to need to move all the other parts, which is completely unwanted). However, this is a game that is designed for potentially up to six players! In the event that you have less than the six players needed to fill the game, perhaps the back side of the player mat could have an important function (like a market reference card to prevent a player from needing to study the market on the table or keep the rule book at their seat!

Here were the brainstormed doodles to accommodate this concept:

For these designs, I went back and forth on the needs a lot!

I felt in some moments that there was not enough data to fill the back of the card, so I included the feather counter in addition to the market options (this also gives the player an option for how they might want to organize their card?).

In other moments, I did not want a player keeping their feathers on these cards, because there were no spaces available to track the other elements (like the birds and tools). So, I played with orientation as well.

Unfortunately, though I know that there is a definite function for this space, I do not land on a design for this that I love enough to follow through with in the prototyping yet. As a result, you can see from the featured image of this post that only the front facing design was drawn out in my extended drafts.

This conversation about the reverse sides of the player mat are not over yet though. There will definitely come a time when we cover this thought again in the future.

With Thanksgiving of this year quickly on the approach, I know that I am about to have a little over 4 full days off to play around with the ideas formulated in these doodle drafts. Between my desire to create the new mini-card prototype & the needs to have these player mats, my objective for next week is to absolutely crank out the task of drawing all 60-70ish of these card designs while I have the opportunity.

Be sure to check back in to the Librarium Games Design Journal to see how it turns out!