❖ Version History ❖

March 22nd, 2024
At this point in time almost everything that we could possibly need for Phoenix Farm is ready to be loaded into the Kickstarter canon. We have a great game, its got a solid look, there’s a wealth of awesome accessories designed & ready to order, we have a price negotiated with the manufacturer… so what’s left?

Well, just the Kickstarter to be honest!
Now becomes the time to assemble to final puzzle pieces in Kickstarter design, which comes in so many different forms that it will likely be the subject of the next four or five Librarium Games Design Journal posts. We will need to build the prototype Kickstarter Document, submit it for review, assemble a web advertising campaign to be distributed for social media & other forums, we need to film/edit/post some videos, gather review content and much much more.

However, before we go down that road, let’s take one last moment to design something fun for the game as a piece of our promotional material! As you can see in the featured image above, we had an idea for a card that was initially going to be in the game to represent the passing of day and night & help remind a player what they can do during the phases of their turn (as discussed back during Part #32 :: Rule Book Design).

Unfortunately this card could not make it into the final game design because it would have been too big of a cost increase to add such a 1-time use item. But! This doesn’t mean that we cannot make the card for our player base! It just means that we have to go about it in a different way.

This card was designed in a very special way. It was intended to be used for a variety of different purposes all at the same time:

• First, this card is hand drawn in the same fashion as our illustrations from the Phoenix Farm Lore Story. This is partially because we were unsure if we were going to be able to offer our customers a physical copy of our Lore Book for Phoenix Farm, so we wanted to compartmentalize the feeling of it in a playing card.

•Second, this card captures the concept of a Total Solar Eclipse, which is symbolic of “Day & Night” all in one symbol of Light & Darkness occurring at the same time. This is also important because a genuine total solar eclipse was coming our way in the North Eastern United States in April of 2024, which was not only right around the corner, but also smack dab in the middle of our Kickstarter Campaign (and what better way to advertise!)

•Third, this illustration shares a very special secret about the experience of being present for a true solar eclipse… which is that birds genuinely become confused & tired during the duration of darkness because they think that it is night time… but then they wake up once again about fifteen minutes later once it is over!

•Fourth, the back of the card design can feature all of the rules we need for the daytime & nighttime features that a player would need reminders for, which offers up a great dual-feature aspect to the two sides of the card.

•Finally, the most important piece of the card’s layout is that a majority of the background is left blank & without detail. This leaves us plenty of room to capture an exquisite foil effect on the card that will leave our players in awe once the final game package arrives (Especially because this card is being included for free to all backers of the game!):

Though it is a bit simple of a design, the look of it in the light like this is just amazing. It is such an adorable card, and it is equally beautiful when it is exploding in rainbows (which a photo can only capture so much).

So, this covers much of what is happening with the front facing design, but what about the back? Well, the most important feature of the back of the card design is to cover the details of a players turn, which breaks down like this:

Daytime:
During the day, the player has two options for actions, but may only choose one of them per turn. They may “Shop” buy going down the mountain to the local town & purchase whatever tools or accessories they need for their farm in future turns. They may instead choose to “Farm”, which means that they already have the tools they need for a farming action, and so they may roll the dice to try and take care of their Phoenixes.

Then, once a daytime action is enacted, we get:

Nighttime:
During a player’s night phase, they may also choose to “Farm” if they still have unused tools they can use for a farming action, and in the same way they may roll the dice to try and take care of their Phoenixes. However, a player may not go “Shopping” during a night phase, because it is too late, the stores are closed. So, instead, they may use a totally different action called “Foraging” if they happen to have purchased a “Firefly Jar” during one of their previous turns. The firefly jar offers up a special ability for players to use on one of their turns, but it can only be activated after the empty jar has been used to “Forage” on a previous turn as well.

That sounds like a mouthful huh? How do we reduce that down to a simple card design??
Well, at first, this was my prototype design:

And for a while, this was totally fine. This was what I thought was the perfect design… but of course that’s not true! it is vague, it is confusing, it doesn’t capture the concept very well, and it unfortunately didn’t print very well when we got this prototype printed (the text was really hard to read.

Now, granted, there is not a lot of additional space to make this text more detailed, but with some design work, and some love, these are the final designs that we had made for our Kickstarter promotion:

And with that we have yet another beautiful design locked & loaded for our publication process!

Now that we have this little step done, we are going to gear up hard for the next steps, so if you are ready for a multi-episode read, get ready for our series of Phoenix Farm Kickstarter Prep! coming soon on the Librarium Games Design Journal! See you soon my friends, and thank you so much for reading!