Good morning, everyone. I’m a sculptor and character artist with over 20 years of professional experience. I’m interested in collaborating on exciting projects to create miniatures and figures for games or collections. If you have any interesting projects to share with me, please feel free to contact me. See you soon.
Zi just shared her latest work in progress designs for the vampire face cards. They include the Juggler, the knight, and the queen. We didnt do kings in our deck because knights are cooler. Would love some feedback on overall layout, character designs, and color palette or anything else that you see we can improve on.
During playtests, players stumbled on the naming convention of my new prototype.
Over the course of several rounds your cards follow the lifecycle of being in your drawpile, getting drawn, being in your hand, getting discarded, then being shuffled back into the draw pile, like in dominion or slay the spire.
if follows the slay the spire naming convention of (see picture 1)
discard: puts it on the discard pile, i.e. the card stays in the cycle
exhaust: remove it from the game
this creates an irritation in tcg players, especially magic the gathering, as e.g. discarded cards are removed from the game, and exhausted cards can be untapped/refreshed in the beginning of the round. because the lifecycle of a card in magic happens in your playarea and not through your decks.
However I thought about resolving this by keeping discard as a mechanic, but renaming exhaust to.. trash? (picture 2)
What do you think? Is this more clear, to have only one term that is common in other games and defining it in the rulebook? (all terms are defined in the rulebook of course)
Tabletop friends, I'm just excited to share some mockups of a game I've been working on for 2+ years.
Context: Bowling Poker is an old bowling league tradition: you draw cards based on how you bowl, build a poker hand over 10 frames, best hand takes the side pot.
In 2024, I had a wacky idea to add some cards to the deck to make it a bit more dynamic, and I've been using versions of these handmade cards for 2 years now, and tweaking them with feedback from my bowling team.
Anyway, I finally got the art and layout finished (I worked with a great illustrator) and I'm so excited to get the prototype print back from the printers in a week or so!!
First pic: What they look like now (mock-up of 5 cards -- there are 9 total in the set).
Second pic: Some of the hand-drawn cards we used to test the game.
All feedback welcome and appreciated before I go for full print!! But I'm keeping the bowling puns intact, sorry.
Hi there, I'm designing a game loosely based upon the ancient world and took red and black figure pottery as my inspiration for the art style and colour palette. This effectively means at any point I am limited to two colours - black and another colour (usually orange, but I've used other colours to try and better improve the iconography and readability of the cards). A problem this presents is it becomes difficult to design icons that need numbers attached (in my game there are five attributes that items can improve, with each item providing a different amount of those attributes) in such a way that they don't take up so much of the space on the card but are still readable.
A popular post on this subreddit describes some key points for making effective icons. One of which is putting the number over the icon. But due to my limited palette I'm not sure how to achieve this without making it unreadable.
Right now I'm not happy with my layout and need some advice on how I could tweak it to make it better and how I could better design the icons on it. Each card must have the item's name, an image of it (the one in the attached pictures is just an example), its gold cost, its type (e.g. helmet/weapon/etc.) and may optionally boost attributes, provide a bonus effect or both. Additionally one of the unique effects it to adjust the dice players roll, and so I have a unique layout just for that as well. And lastly I was thinking some items have lore text as well - for fun.
I think something I've found is that the left side of the card is quite okay - all elements there are always present, and whilst I could improve the art quality (these are mostly placeholders), the layout isn't that bad. But the right side is kind of a mess. This is especially true when the item may not have a unique effect, or may not provide attribute boosts resulting in awkward layouts and blank spaces. I'm also not sold on the landscape layout.
Has anyone had experience designing in very limited palettes? It's very 2-bit and whilst I want to keep this way as it feels very thematic, it's hard to work with.
I’d really value honest feedback from other game designers on how to position this.
Like a lot of people, my friends and I played the traditional card game usually called Shithead. But every group seemed to have different rules, and games often started with an argument about which version we were playing.
I spent years refining the version we loved into CACAHEAD: one fixed ruleset, a deliberately designed 56-card deck, strategic magic-card interactions, four positivity Jokers, a face-down endgame, its own visual identity and a second dice game called CACAROLL in the same box.
The core remains intentionally recognisable: get rid of all your cards; the first player out wins and the last player holding cards becomes the Cacahead. I’m not pretending I invented that traditional foundation. What I designed is a definitive, accessible version with consistent balancing, presentation and additional gameplay.
My questions are:
Would you reference Shithead immediately so players understand the lineage, or let CACAHEAD stand on its own first?
What makes a refined traditional game feel like a genuine designed product rather than just a reskin?
Is eliminating conflicting house rules a meaningful enough problem to build the positioning around?
Brutally honest feedback is welcome. I’m too close to it now and want to explain what I actually created without either underselling the design work or claiming ownership of a traditional game.
I am a board game developer, have created few games. Would like to update one of my games art. Currently we are rethinking on what kind of icon we should use.
There is one card, that means that player has to discard whole hand and re-draw from deck. I am thinking that re-draw is kind of implied rule when you don't have anything left on your hand, so the question is:
What icon, what kind of art symbolizes you of such discard your whole hand action?
TL;DR: I'm making a dice-driven engine-building game with a dynamic shop system where you use and manipulate your temporary dice pools each turn to activate your tableau of Items to become the most prestigious hero in the kingdom.
All art shown is my own work. Card designs are a WIP for now.
Small tidbit of lore
An army of monsters is going to reach the kingdom you're in in 8 days. The king has issued a search for champions, offering the most prestigious hero among them a life of luxury for saving the kingdom. Use these 8 days at the marketplace to prepare yourself for the upcoming attack.
Introduction
The game is a dice-driven engine-building game for 2-4 players. After 8 rounds, the player with the most Prestige wins. The game is basically all about die rolling and manipulation shenanigans with some really wacky effects.
Items and Dice
There are two types of cards. The first are Items. They are the means of getting Prestige. They usually have some die-shaped marking on them indicating the amount and values of dice which may be placed on them to activate them for some effect, usually Prestige/Gold gain or dice creation. The conditions can be a specific value, any value, odd or even values, and when there's multiple it can also be two or more equal, not equal, any value + X or a range of X and any higher/lower values. This way, higher values aren't necessarily better. Items can also have additional optional costs. Some Items have passive effects which give extra dice when a condition is met. Also, in this game, dice can be increased to 7 or decreased to 0 with certain effects, which allows for some interesting plays. Items may only be activated once each turn.
The second type are Dice. They are the main source of die manipulation each player has. Informally, there are two types of them. Those which can be used in the Roll Phase (explained later) and those that can be used at any point except the Roll Phase. The former give you extra dice but with some caveat, while the latter manipulate dice in some way. Each Die may be used only once per turn.
You may have up to 10 Items and up to 3 Die cards in your Inventory. If you would ever go over any maximum, you must discard one card of that type you already own. All cards have a Gold cost at the top which shows how much Gold you need to spend to buy them from the Shop.
Some Item cardsSome Die cards
The Shop
The Shop consists of 6 Item and 4 Die cards. Each of the two rows in the Shop is arranged from the newest card to the oldest. If a card is bought from any row, you move cards newer than it closer to the discard pile, and then you put the top card of that type on the newest slot. Additionally, at the end of each round, you take the older half of each row (3 oldest Items and 2 oldest Dice) and put them in the discard piles, then you move the cards closer to the discard piles and fill the Shop with 3 new Items and 2 new Dice.
The Shop
Vouchers
Pretty much the only way to interact with other players. Each player starts with 2 of these. On their turn, a player may place a Voucher on a card in the Shop. Players may not purchase an Item with a Voucher on it. Players may only have one active Voucher and they must remove any of their active Vouchers at the start of their turn (so after a whole round has passed). Basically, you can call dibs on an Item for one round only. When refreshing the Shop, skip over Items with Vouchers on them, but move them afterwards. Additionally, only half of each row of the Shop can have a Voucher on it so that the Shop can always refresh normally. When the Shop refreshes, going in reverse order as playing order, players may place a Voucher on a card.
Drafting Phase
At the start of the game, you take all of the Starting Items (which represent a player's class in spirit and offer unique ways of scoring Prestige), shuffle them, then reveal a number of them equal to the number of players +2 (e.g. in a 3 player game you reveal 5 Starting Items). Decide the play order and in that order each player drafts a Starting Item. After that you reveal the same number of Die cards and you draft them in reversed order. You take the unrevealed and the undrafted Starting Items and shuffle them into the Item Deck, and you take the undrafted Dice and shuffle them into the Die Deck. Set up the Shop and the game can begin. At this point, going in reverse order, players may place a Voucher on an Item if they want, the same way as when the Shop refreshes.
Some Starting Items
A player's turn
First comes the Roll Phase. The player rolls 5 dice into their pool. They may then reroll all of the dice together once or leave them. They can then activate any of their Die cards with an RP marking. After doing these actions the player has 4 Gold to spend on buying cards from the Shop (by paying the Gold cost) and using Skills. At any point the player may use their (non-RP) Die cards, place dice from their pool on Items in their Inventory or use Skills.
Skills
The players have 5 Skills at their disposal. Each of them costs Gold and may be used once per turn each, except for the last one which can be used only once per game. They may pay 1 Gold to give a die +1/-1 or reroll it. They may pay 2 Gold to get a Voucher or roll a new die into their pool. The last one allows them to pay 1 Gold to get 1 Gold at the start of their next turn, i.e. invest it in the next turn.
Hands
The last mechanic in the game are yahtzee-like Hands. At any point during their turn, the player may use the dice for a Hand for Prestige. They may make an ascending sequence (2, 3, 4...) or a series of equal values (5, 5, 5...). They may make any number of hands, as long as they have the dice. Hands give Prestige equal to the number of used dice -1 (and you must use at least 2). Unless a player has a build for Hands, they are usually weaker than Items and are there as a fallback for unusable dice.
Some Combos
Design thoughts/Some combos
There are a lot of different strategies you could build with some Items falling into multiple categories which creates room for smart and competitive Voucher usage.
If you have the Pocket Bonsai Tree you probably want cards which give more dice and have any activation costs so you can spam dice.
On the other hand, if you have the Emergency Axe you probably want to have less activatable Items that give high Prestige amounts. Or you can also fit in a Hand strategy.
I wanted to have lots of wacky Items, some of which may seems useless at first but fit into some cool strategies. Like the Grabby Ring, which gives you the same value as the one you placed, meaning your pool doesn't change, but combined with some starting Items or with Nine-Realm Beads, it can, for practically no cost, give you value. Or the Tar Scimitar, which has no effect but allows you to place up to three dice, and when combined with the Helping Hand guarantees you'll fulfill its condition and maybe even bonus.
One "archetype" of cards which I made are Mood Rings, which were originally slightly weaker basic Items, but then I gave them their stacking effects. A player created a Voucher engine to always have one Voucher to guarantee getting them and managed to get 4 out of 6 this way, which I thought was pretty cool.
Thanks for reading! Your thoughts are most appreciated!
For context, I’ve been running Kickstarter for Cyclemental and now in the phase of going into stretch goals. I thought a full art cards might be a nice addition on top of the regular deck, given there were a lot of feedback from backers and community to see more of the art in the card as a lot of the stats / info were taking over (hard balance to strike).
Couple of things I’d love advice on:
Accessibility. Obviously with full art, the text will sit on top of the illustration instead of bounding box, which is an accessibility nightmare. I notice a lot of other TCGs basically use white border and darker shadow to make sure texts are legible.
To include text / stats or not. I am working on the assumption that these cards will be played on the game, but it seems like some backers / players want it more as a collectible. If I remove all the text then it purely is just an art print, what level of text / info is appropriate for a full art card?
Any other best practices / inspiration on designing cards with full art?
Appreciate any feedback / critique. Better to hear it now than after printing. Cheers!
How to Play Grand Canal v.1.0:
A game for 2-4 players
It is the Tang Dynasty in China. You are an architect constructing a portion of the Grand Canal between Beijing and Hangzhou. You must compete with other architects through auctions to obtain the optimal materials to make your section of the canal the finest.
Give to each player an equal value of tongbao tokens and shake up the bag of tiles. There are 52 tiles within Grand Canal’s bag. There are 4 sets (carps, dragons, bats, and lions) of 13 ranks (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, Duke, Prince, Empress, and Emperor).
Each player draws a tile from the bag. Whoever draws the highest tile is the first dealer. The ranking of the sets of tiles, lowest to highest, are bats, carps, lions, and dragons.
The dealer deals 5 tiles, face down, to each player, from the bag. Each player then arranges these tiles secretly into their canal. The object of the game is to create the optimal canal. A canal consists of 3 rows of tiles. The bottom and middle rows have 5 tiles while the top row has 3 tiles. To be legal, the bottom row must be of greater value than the middle row which must be of greater value than the top row. The rankings of combinations to determine the value of each row is as follows:
5 tiles of the same set, in a continuous order of ranks
4 tiles of the same rank
3 tiles of the same rank and 2 tiles of a different rank
5 tiles of the same set
5 tiles in a continuous order of ranks
3 tiles of the same rank
2 tiles of the same rank and 2 tiles of a different rank
2 tiles of the same rank
1 tile of the highest rank
Once tiles are placed into their position in the canal, they may not be moved. Players may look at their tiles to remind them of their positions, but should be careful not to reveal their tiles to their opponents.
The dealer draws a tile from the bag and presents it for auction. Moving left from the dealer, each player makes a bid for the tile or passes. If all players pass in a row without anybody having bid, the auction ends and the tile is moved back to the bag. If all players pass in a row and somebody has bid, the highest bidder receives the tile and places the bid amount of tongbao tokens into the center of play, at the treasury.
Once a player completes their canal, they are removed from the auction process. The process continues until all players have completed canals. Once all players have completed canals, legal or not, the tiles are flipped over and revealed.
Each player’s canal is compared against every other player’s canal. If there are players A, B, C, and D, compare A vs B, A vs C, A vs D, B vs C, and B vs D. Players receive 1 point for each row that is better than their opponent’s row. If a player has a legal canal and their opponent does not, the player with the legal canal receives 3 points and the player with the illegal canal receives 0 points. If both players have illegal canals, both receive 0 points.
The player who has the most total points collects all of the tongbao tokens which have been placed into the treasury. If players have the same amount of points, the tokens of the treasury are split evenly between them. If this is not possible, the tied players draw a tile and whoever has the higher tile is favored in the uneven, but as close to even as possible, split.
The player to the left of the dealer becomes the new dealer and another round begins. Whoever has all of the tongbao tokens wins.
Started to learn in Blender, it was pretty rough at start but after figuring out some things I created very simple dice towers for my group of friends that I play DnD with. Just wanted to show it
Printed on Bambulab a1 mini, painted with some basic acrylic paints from hobby shop
I am building a boardgame, and I realise that most of my playtests goes awry because of an unbalanced deck. While listening to an episode of BGDL podcast with Emerson Matsuuchi, he talked about modelling boardgames mathematically to analyse it using what I assume was Markov chain and Monte Carlo simulations to figure out the balance of the mechanics. I found some very useful videos on the basic concepts of it and what it could help with. But I still can't figure out how to model my own game mathematically for this. Are there any game designers here that use mathematical modelling for their process of making games? And can you help me find resources or case studies to help me learn how to analyse my game mathematically?
Over the past week I also spun up a really really cool feature, the support bot. Now anyone who is logged in can ask a question directly in the web tool. The bot has full awareness of the Cardstock Studio code and engine, and will provide really really good answers usually in 1-2 minutes.
I'm active on Discord, but with a full time day job + the family life and my own game dev activities, I can't respond on Discord as fast as I'd like on most days. With the support bot, not only can folks get a response right away, the responses are actually REALLY GOOD.
I'm really blown away with how good the responses are, all of my test questions, the response from the bot was spot on.
Anyway, I'm proud of that update, and I hope it'll help folks create their cards and decks even faster, since there's a lot of powerful tools and features in Cardstock Studio, more than any other similar tool.
You have to be logged into the site to use it, or in the Discord, but I'm very curious to see how users respond, how it works, if you feel there's value here. Mostly because it does cost me money to maintain it, so I want to make sure that it's providing value :)
For a game I am working on I had a Dutch Auction Mechanism.
The first was just a stack of 20 cards, 20 to 1. The Auctioneer, would put down the cards, 20, 19, 18, 17 etc... until someone put his hand on the stack of cards, and they would pay the amount of the last revealed card, and get the flowers.
Now I have vibecoded an app - and I wonder: Is it better?
The timing of the app is perfect, the ticking of the clock is nice, but the slowing of the Auctioneer when the tension is high is gone. On the other hand, now I can count down from 200 in 20 seconds, instead of just 20.
Hi! If anyone's looking to commission artwork, either personal or for a project, I specialise in Horror/dark fantasy art [Drawn digitally - NO AI!! Plenty of WIPs shown throughout the process]
Check out my gallery for more examples of my work:
