I am working on a new card design for my boardgame Gotlandia, a game about the Golden Age of Gotland 1100-1400. I have play tested extensively with the current set of cards and I am happy with how the game plays now and want to introduce it to more players.
As many cards are now outdated or with pencilled in changes that I have decided on, I wanted to create a new set of cards. This is also an opportunity to address another design challenge. How to teach the game.
An important part of boardgame design is how the components of the game communicates the rules. Can first time players learn and remember how the game works by having the physical components in front of them? You can have a rule book for reference, but when playing the game, you want to be able to figure out what an action does in a specific situation without asking or looking up rules.
One issue I heard from play testers consistently was how the cards communicated optional actions. Some cards have an optional action that you can take after you have taken one of two other actions. For instance in Wisby you can get a trading partner (buy a trading card) after you have sold your resources.
So I went in with a critical eye and played around with how to improve this. Sketching on paper, looking at how other games have done. Bouncing around ideas as I walked the dog. It took a couple of weeks of background processing before I landed on a visual design that I am truly happy with.
Reusing colours and elements from the front cover and switching between three different cards, it was an iterative process that sometimes required working all the way down to the fine details before I could decide whether I liked it or not.
This is what I came up with.
I'm using a trimmed down version of the front cover as a placeholder image across all cards. I don't want to use AI generated images and for the next stage of development, a placeholder image will do.
One design challenge I struggled with a long time was to come up with visuals for the four terrain types, pasture, hill, field, forest. How do you draw a forest or a field and condense it into something very small that still communicates clearly what it is? I finally realised that if I used coloured circles with the resource icon on top, it would say "place where you can find this". So the pasture is a circle with a sheep on top. Simple!
During the process I was inspired to also redo the card backs. And now I'm working on updated designs for the generations cards and reputation cards. So what I initially thought was a small update taking a couple of days has been weeks of fun design work.
I'm using GIMP which has the big advantage that it doesn't cost an exorbitant monthly fee. The downside is that while you can do a great many visual effects, it can take many manual steps to get there.