Spell cards and creature templates

The spell cards were easy to make.

Fortunately, I usually have a bunch of spare game cards hanging around. These are a by-product of my side business of selling Star Wars Armada stuff on eBay; I planned to use the spare cards as a base for creating ‘spell cards’. These spell cards would make a deck from which players could draw from. 

After measuring the rough size of the cards ,I knocked up a set of templates in Inkscape that I then printed out, cut out and then glue onto the Armada playing cards. If you’ve not used it, Inkscape is a vector drawing package that’s noteworthy for being completely free!

In theory, producing templates digitally would allow me to quickly modify and reproduce them. I’m all about productivity!

There was no cutting required for the spell cards. For the creature representations, I cut up a variety of different sized rectangles of card to allow me to make human sized creatures, animals and larger giant-sized creatures such as ogres or trolls. I had no idea what size pieces of card I should use, so I just took a guess! The smallest pieces that represented human sized creatures were 40mm x 40mm. I still don’t know what size I’ll use in the final game – I’ll refine the scale way into the future after a significant amount of play testing. 

Make a list of creatures

With the cardboard ready, I needed to come up with some creatures to implement. The first step was to brain-dump a list of them into Evernote, and give them some attributes that defined them. Rather than think too much, I used ideas lifted from every other fantasy game made – elves, dwarves, wolves etc. I can come up with my own unique ideas in my own time. Right now, I just need things to play with!

Stats and abilities

Previous to building these components, I’d done some thinking on how I might want to model the creatures in terms of game statistics. These ideas didn’t have to be final, they just had to be something that I could create easily and put into practice to see how it all worked.

This is what I was aiming for at version 1:

• Creatures would have a “health” stat
• Each creature would have a number of combat dice for fighting each other; I’d have different dice as follows:
  • Standard dice
  • Heavy dice; these would add greater swing to the dice results
  • Magic dice; much more rare – these would be purely offensive
  • Dice would have the concept of a critical result which could activate an ability or add to the damage
• I would have modifier keywords that would signal that creatures benefited from special game mechanics, for example, “flying” to indicate that the creature flew when it moved.

Making the Creatures

Once I had a list of creatures, I also needed some other type of spells: think fireballs and lightning bolts. These were easy to come up with – again, I just used ideas from the genre.  In the long term I’d need a database of this kind of spell, but for now, just a few quick ideas were adequate for testing game mechanics.

Using the list of spells and creatures, I just wrote up some spell cards. Creatures would be summoned from a spell card, and spells would be cast from a spell card . With the spell cards done, I drew some quick sketches on the cardboard templates to give the creatures  pieces some character. And, that’s all I needed for now!

Check those corners

To create a play area, I simply butchered a few Post-it notes; I created some yellow ‘corners’ to indicate the boundaries of the play area. A game ‘feature’ that I’m set on having is that the game should be playable on any reasonably sized flat area, whether a  square, rectangle or circle; big or small. I’d like the players to be able to make use of what they have.

What did I learn?

By making these components and laying them out on a table I gained a feeling for the physical size of everything, and consequently got a better idea of  what I should focus on developing next.  This was probably the biggest learning and benefit of the “just do it” – working out where to spend your effort!

What’s next?

After an afternoon’s cutting, gluing and drawing, the test build wasn’t 100% ready to play yet, but I’d made 90% of the components. My next post will look at some essential game mechanics and how the creature combat dice system was going to work.