❖ Version History ❖

8th of February, 2021:
This past week in The Great Chase I bounced around finalizing the fixes that needed to happen across all of the front facing card designs. In addition to that task I had a conversation with Matt about touching up the rule book almost every day. We have been collaborating on the language, the layout, the descriptions and the images needed with the hope of getting this book to be as informative and user friendly as possible, and it takes us about seven different attempts before we land on a version that we are both happy with.

Behind the scenes of these rule book conversations, Matt has also sent me a healthy pile of prototype artwork for what he would like the back facing card designs to look like. This process is interesting because we only have four types of cards in this game, so you would assume that we only have four designs to make… but we actually have a plan for 44 total pieces of artwork on the card backs. To Further elaborate on why, we will explore what each of the card back designs look like, and how we decided to expand our decisions as we progressed:

Across the entirety of the Flight Deck, there is only one back design. We need these cards to feel and appear totally random when shuffled and face down. To give the Flight Deck a nice touch in the Game Theme, we styled it exactly like a compass from the control panel in the cockpit. We had decided a long time ago to have real flight control instruments as a part of the card back design, and though it didn’t make it on all of the card backs, it was kept for the Flight Deck and the Mission deck due to their significant in-game relationship.

We also wanted the back designs to remain anonymous on the Character I.D. Cards. There is a chance you might not want to know who you have on your team until the game begins, and so we kept it a secret who would come out of the hangar until the cards were flipped over. In picking the artwork for these designs, we wanted to capture the feel of a place that the team might gather. Since The Great Chase is a game that these characters would be playing while in transit from one investigation to another, capturing an image of their aircraft before flight felt like the right way to go.

Then of course, we started getting a little bit artistically greedy with our ability to alter the front and back designs. In discussing what the back of the Map Deck should look like, I had made a suggestion that we could place the entire title of the game across each card of the back, so that if you were to ever flip it over, it would be a big beautiful banner. Matt was particularly fond of this idea, and so of course we figured out a way to make it happen… but in discovering this new concept of differing the front and back designs, we had an even larger task in front of us:

We had already decided how cool it would be to have real imagery of cockpit controls on the back side of our Mission and Flight Decks. And now Matt had seen what kind of magic could happen with changing the back of card designs. With only one deck left to design for, he had come back to me with a lucrative idea for the Mission Deck: have the imagery of it feature the cockpit’s altimeter, and have the ascending difficulty of the individual missions change the flight level on that altimeter. Though the thought of doing thirty more unique designs for the back side of the mission decks felt like an overwhelming task, the idea of how it would turn out in the end was too tantalizing to pass up. In the back of my mind I am already picturing how cool it will be to sort this deck from hardest to easiest and then flip through it like a flip book to watch the altimeter freak out like a plane literally falling from the sky.
~ Talk about capturing the Theme in a way I had never even considered! ~

In the end, it is yet another crazy week for The Great Chase. By the time that we get everything organized it is hard to believe just how fast the time goes to get it all done. But. We are in a moment of grand success. After we get these back facing designs completed, we have officially done a revamping of each and every piece of necessary artwork for the full game. We do a little bit of review & revising before actually pushing the send button, but by the end of this day we have officially uploaded all of our content and ordered our first prototype kits to be delivered in the next week or so!