❖ Version History ❖

10th of August, 2020
Having received the first printed prototype of Calendra in the mail a few weeks ago made me start to realize just how many more things could be done to make the game a better experience for people. At the very top of that list of improvements was tackling the idea of writing a rule book.

To this point in time… I’ve made games all my life, but I have never had to consider what a perfect set of rules would look like for any single game I’ve ever introduced to the world. Why you ask? Well… I am typically sitting right there at the table with you while we play any game that I have created, so if the rules need explaining, everyone at the table takes the time to discuss the rules as a group to anyone who might be confused.

Needless to say… writing the rules down in a: short, cohesive, concise way with images and illustrations that help bridge the understanding of the game’s design is, at this point in time, very foreign territory for me.

So… Where does one start?

Well…

I think no matter what, the first and most important thing is:

What can fit in the box?

In terms of Calendra’s game design, the original goal has been to create the game in the 3.5″x5.5″x1″ box that was available off of The Game Crafter website (known as the Small Pro Box). I chose this container because it was the smallest box that could hold 124 cards, and it has about 2mm of space available above the cards where the rule book could rest.

In addition to these details, the cost of the game is very important to me. The goal is to keep the rules simple no matter what so that it is not overwhelming for the player to digest how to play the game. The next most important aspect of this is that small booklets that are made for games like this typically come with a layout of 4 page intervals (one sheet printed on both sides and folded in half), and the cost changes based on how many of these pages you need to use. Unfortunately, I consider 4 pages to not be enough for what I need, so the goal is to keep the page count under 8.

So what does that leave us with?

Well… we know the book is going to be 3″x5″ with 8 or less pages.

Next up, I think it is critical to get a base design down for how the book pages will be laid out (the trim artwork and color scheme of the book). In starting this process I designed what I thought the cover should look like, which is the featured image above. I liked having the Celtic knots as the border for the pages, and I think it only appropriate to have the rule pages colored purple to represent the Ferric Season.

From here… we enter the real challenging aspect: translating the rule concept into words. To put things simply, I basically wrote these following pages with little to no idea if the attempt would make sense in the end… I just needed it to make sense to me at first to see where it could be improved…
…and so here we have it, the very first rule book I ever wrote:

To be honest…

It seemed really good to me.

I was completely satisfied with the information I could get in… and it felt incredibly concise by comparison to how I had been going about it in my scribblings and notes from before I began. But.. there are some elements to this that are really tough to assess from just the digital side. I need to actually hold the rule book in my hands to see how it feels and how it reads, because the iPad is deceptive in this way… it lets you make the text any size you want with the super powers of zooming in and out.

Needless to say… after the weeks of working on it, I was also sort of done trying to make it make sense in that moment. I just wanted to get it printed and check how it was going in person. And honestly, I thought it would be especially useful to have the book in hand so that I could ask strangers to read through it it and tell me what they think is and isn’t working about the layout and design.

So. Back to the waiting times again. Another printed copy of the game should arrive in the mail from The Game Crafter in the next week or two so that I can investigate this book in person. Check back in on The Design Journal next time to see where we end up with out next iteration of Calendra!