❖ Version History ❖

August 2nd, 2023
Who am I Kidding…. Wait 2-3 weeks for new cards to come in on a material I have never used before? Pishhhaw I say! Fire up the laser and print that sucker at max velocity with a huge down payment for rush delivery boiiiiii!!!!!!

So anyway, as you may have noticed, it has literally only been what, four days since our last post where I talked about needing to get our new designs printed? Well, I of course saw that I could have them rush delivered, and you better believe that I would be paying top dollar for that to happen (I am excited, what can I say!)

As you can see in the image above, our transparent cards are looking good so far! (I forgot to mention in our previous post that there is something really cool about how to “capture” the translucent nature in the design, you have to leave areas that are going to appear blank at 100% perfect white color. Anything that is even 1-degree off of 100% white will just look white).

But as you might have noticed up above, these are only the “Clothing” Cards, or rather, the top card in the stack. What about the other card designs? How did the patterns turn out? Well, here’s what they look like on the first print:

Now, of course, when I get new cards in the mail, I am rarely excited about the results. I will be happy with the things that are successes, of course… but I will also almost immediately jump into deep critiques of my own work in an excited rush of learning that takes place upon seeing the results for the first time out of the atmosphere of my computer.

While I do absolutely love the results, there are a few things that I am not thrilled with when I get to seeing these cards for the first time. Here’s a breakdown of my thoughts:

1. The edges of the designs have a thin white layer surrounding them. This was something I was warned about when looking into the specs of the designs, but it is a bit more area than I had anticipated. Having known the effect this would have, I would have made the inner designs slightly larger.

2. And while we’re on the topic of the scale, I also notice rather immediately that many of the designs are much much smaller than I was anticipating (see specifically the cards on the left side of the image above). This is a very important feature to have identified in this step of the process. I had already decided that there would be at least one more prototype of this game made when I cut some corners on the initial design process… but now I have a concrete goal to fix in this error. The designs must be at least 30%-50% larger to let more color pass through.

3. Centering. This is…. a long term beef of mine with the people running the workshop over at the print company I use for the print-on-demand prototypes that we make. They make very very nice cards… the materials and colors are quite frequently amazing. But. They do not do the best job with centering their cards during the print (a sacrifice we must accept when getting something as crazy as a ‘1 of 1’ print of something I suppose). In any event, I can tell just from a first glance at these that the centering isn’t amazing, and that is of course going to affect the rest of the interactions of the cards (because everything must be in perfect alignment for this process to work correctly). Luckily, when it comes to our Hong-Kong manufacturer, we get nearly flawless prints with every game that we have had made thus far… so we will just have to hang tight for our final prototype to experience the true joys of this game concept!

But what can you do! You know? Sometimes you just have to make something come out of the printer to see what needs to be adjusted, and that is the wonderful glory of the prototyping phase! To be honest, I love these sorts of moments, because it feels like you are literally leveling up in the moment of it, and solid progress is being established to making a better game in the end! It’s exciting!

So let’s take a peek at how the color cards came out:

So, these cards, being printed on card stock just the same as any other game that we have made to this point in time, were a lot easier to predict the outcomes of. While I am always striving to achieve a greater skill in print color theory, I know pretty well what to expect nowadays. So, needless to say, these cards came out pretty much exactly as anticipated.

Out of the twelve different colors that were printed, there are only really 2-3 that I have any issues with. The Yellow-Green didn’t come out quite as nice as I had been hoping for, and there were many… ‘complaints’ about my use of yellow, suggesting that my yellow color choice was a bit too orange in nature (despite the fact that I like it so much hah!).

Now, for the moment you have all been waiting for, let’s take a peek at how all of the cards interact with one another once they have been stacked!

Wow. Wow. Wow.
Isn’t that nice!

It is pretty amazing to finally see it happen, and to have it happen so successfully!

Now, of course, as we already noted, the centering is trash. But the transparent function of the cards actually works out so much smoother than I expected! You can super clearly see through the cards to make out the pattern, the numbers, the words, and the colors of both cards underneath the top one! I am thrilled by this. Until this very moment I was not necessarily sure that the cards could even be played with… But now we have something tangible. We have something we can actually play with!

….. We just need some friends! hah!

No worries! I am already scheming to get myself out to Amherst to see Ben, Aimee, & Aya for a first play test! But. that day won’t be today unfortunately. So, we will simply have to enjoy imagining the gameplay with these cards for now until we can get a proper game-night initiated! I hope you enjoyed experiencing the magic of this moment with me, and stay tuned for another entry in the Librarium Games Design Journal sometime soon! As always, thank you for reading!