❖ Version History ❖

February, 2025
Alrightyyyy,
Well, we have been on quite the hiatus for the actual “game” development side of Royal Threadcount lately due to how much we have been concentrating on the upgrades to our 3d-printing process!

I think it’s about time to get back on the saddle for some discussion on game mechanics, and today we have a really interesting combo problem to solve: how do we improve on a mechanic while also making an effort to reduce the costs of the overall budget? The heart of this discussion is going to fall on a key topic in the history of our game development: player cards that help to organize game data & reduce the weight of component costs!

But, there is a lot to consider here regarding the pros, cons, and overall aesthetic performance of the game! So let’s break it all down and see what we end up with!

Part #1 :: The Problem…
What you are looking at in these images are the typical components that a player will be shuffling around each and every turn of the game. They are all little wooden cubes, and each color represents something different:

• White Cubes are for “Silk”, used as a currency to exchange for pattern & color cards.

• Blue Cubes are “Blue Dye”, used to exchange for color cards that include blue:
(red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green, green, yellow-green)

• Red Cubes are “Red Dye”, used to exchange for color cards that include red:
(yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, red-violet, violet, blue-violet)

• Yellow Cubes are “Yellow Dye”, used to exchange for color cards that include yellow:
(blue-green, green, yellow-green, yellow, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange)

Up until this point in the prototyping, we have basically been handing a small pile of these cubes over to each player during the gameplay & letting the players sort them however they please… but this is not ideal, and it makes explaining certain rules of the game challenging / time-consuming.

But, we also have another small issue…
The card that I had in mind originally for each player was the size of a poker card (as exemplified in the images up above). As you can see from those shots, the poker-sized card is absolutely not going to fit all of these pieces in a comfortable manor… so we need something better.

For those of you who have been following along in the Librarium Games Design Journal, you might remember these fine doodles from about 7-10 posts ago. As you can see from the illustration on the left side, I have been thinking about this player card for some months now… I had all sorts of ideas behind how to make it work…

But, I also had this card on the right in mind. This is a design destined for the “Jumbo” playing card, like the one we used in Phoenix Farm to create player-mats for each player’s farmstead, except, this time the jumbo card is intended for the interaction space at the middle of the table, rather than each individual player. In the time between the post where these were first highlighted & now, I have actually gone ahead & graphically designed this jumbo card, which currently looks like this:

Now, to be honest, I had not spent all that much time planning a design for the back side of this card, as, it was never intended to be flipped over at any point in time. If it were to have a back design, it would likely be something scenic to add flavor to the game’s design / sneak in some classical Japanese art history into the game… But. What if this back-of-the-card space could help us solve our other issue???

It is silly how simple but brilliant this proposition actually works out to being. Not only does this help us simplify the components we will need printed, but having a larger area of space to work with on the card can help us cut down on the actual physical pieces we would need for the game to work as well. Here’s all of the details of what this could do for us:

Part #2 :: The Solution:
• With this larger area on the card for graphic design, we can designate space for the player to track their dye & silk cubes. Instead of each player needing x3-4 of each color cube in the game, they could slide the cube across the card to see how much dye they are carrying.

• This jumbo sized card also creates the possibility of a silk-tracker that functions similarly to the player’s dye cubes & gives us an area to help explain the limitations of how much silk they are allowed to hold at one time.

• Maybe the most important aspect: the larger space allows us the possibility of creating a color-exchange chart (to help explain the options of buying color cards). This converts our “storage” usage of the player card into a dual purpose “player aid” as well, & reduces what needs to be written into the rule book, saving us space & money later on in this process!

With this one change up in the design specifications, we are now looking at these possible changes to the overall budget:
• 13-less white cubes in the game design
• 9-12 less colored cubes in the game design (depending on final player count)
• 1-less page in the rule book
• same amount of cards in the game (4-less poker cards, 4+more jumbo cards)
• Cleaner / more functional mechanics in the flow of the gameplay.

It is definitely a win-win situation. Let’s see how it looks now that I have designed it:

All in all, this is one of the magnificent aspects of taking the time to do really good game design. This player mat solves so many problems & really impacts the quality of playing the game (not to mention makes the game look a lot cooler too). I love being able to find solutions like this to make the game a better experience for everyone.

However, we are far from finishing the product & have a long way to go in improving the final designs of the game. So, for today we will put a pause on the topic & begin preparing our next big adventure for the Librarium Games Design Journal! Be sure to tune in sometime soon, where we will tackle one of the biggest issues of the entire design journey for Royal Threadcount thus far: the total player count!