❖ Version History ❖

July – September, 2021
Once the score calculator for Phoenix Farm had been built onto the Librarium Games Website, I knew that it was time to start taking this project a bit more seriously.

Luckily, with The Great Chase hitting Kickstarter in mid-late July of 2021, there were some free time pockets popping up in my schedule. (Ironically, having a project finally make it to Kickstarter was one of the few moments where I could catch a breath, because there were finally no more things that I needed to design!)

At this exact intersection in time, Calendra was finished getting a big update, The Great Chase was effectively complete, and the perfect little window of time existed for me to focus my energy on prototyping designs again. So, I whipped up a quick design for my Cricut, cut out a bunch of card stock, snuck it into the restaurant with me, and started getting some designs made!

As you can see in the featured image above, these tiny brown cards are the finished results of what I was working on. This is the first time the layout of ‘official’ cards were even being seriously considered. So, let’s take some time to analyze what happened in this step of the design and start to see what was sticking vs what wasn’t:

Here we have a close up image of the tool card for the ‘Broom’ in Phoenix Farm. It is a two sided card, where the front facing design features the: title, cost, image, and goal (right side of the image). On the back side of the card we have four rows of information, and they showcase the four possible outcomes of what happens when you roll one dice to use this tool (left side of the image).

The dimensions of the card are absolutely tiny… they are 1.75″ x 1.25″, which, if you are not sitting right in front of a ruler, is only a little larger than the size of… maybe a quarter?

We had selected this size at first to see how it would feel once the deck was made in this way. There would be some major benefits if the game could be this small: the cost is lower, the information going on the cards is simple enough to be small, and it could all squeeze into a tiny box if needed.

… But there are also some horrible things about cards this small… and making this prototype was an important step in getting familiar with these details. The reason you only see cards here based on the ‘Tools’ and none about the ‘Phoenixes’ is because I decided to stop drawing this set of cards once I got through the first batch. They were too tiny, they were hard to handle, and impossible to sort/shuffle/organize.

You may have noticed that, once again, the dragon is back to being a D6 (six-sided dice) obstacle, rather than the D10 that we had discussed a few chapters ago in the Design Journal. We had concluded after several additional rounds of play testing that the addition of the “Bait Tool” and its functional modifications made the dragon a little bit more tolerable than it had been before ~ though we are still unsettled on how this rule is going to work in the end.

But there were some good and important things happening in this phase of the card design. Most notably, the idea of adding a little dice symbol to show what happens when the dice is rolled! This was a detail that I have never implemented in a game design of ours before, and it was a really nice way to cut down on lots of descriptive text!

While I really loved the idea of these dice-symbol descriptors, I was running into a few issues that I did not love about this though. Firstly, using the entire back side of the card to hold this information felt like a waste of space and info. Additionally, with the exception of the “Dragon Bait” card shown above, the cards all have identical text for the results when rolling a: 1, 2, or 3 on the dice. ~ This felt as if it could be improved.

Though this ended up being a prototype design that was cut short in its journey to creation, it was a major step up in the process of developing the game design and the rules. While making these micro cards, Ben and I had also been developing new elements to the rule scheme and the wording other cards to be better.

We had developed two little ideas about how to improve the flow and feel of the money in the game. One where a player cannot actually begin buying gold until a certain checkpoint in the gameplay had been reached, and another where the cost of gold was actually raised by one to prevent the game from ending quite as quickly as it had been previously.

All in all, this was a time where the rules of the game were almost entirely in flux again. New card layouts were happening, new wordings of the rules were happening, the size, shape, and function of the cards were all shifting, and Phoenix Farm was truly going through a ‘transformative’ time in its life (pun entirely intended). Be sure to check back in for more Design Journal entries soon, where we talk more about the dragon & other card design ideas that blossomed from this phase of iterating!