A first look at the Cards

I have my first prototype of what the Cards will look like so wanted to share it with you.

The new Hotness!

It has taken a lot longer than I originally thought, partially because of work monopolizing my time, all the gaming I have done over the Holidays, and the complexity that my Data Sets have taken on.  In addition, while working on creating the new Data Sets, I became unhappy with some of the Event Cards.  I have been struggling with how to make the old Event Cards, which only affected an individual player, work on a Global Scale to affect all players evenly.  Many of the Cards just didn't work, so I had to scrap them and create new ones.  Some of the ones I kept needed to have their mechanics changed.  

The Deadly Storm.

The Storm Cards were the most problematic Events.  Where they once just hit a single player, they now needed to affect an area.  I played around with dividing the map into 3 section, north center, and south.  To make it simple I even thought about making Storms affect the whole map, but this felt cheep.  Instead I choose to use the same mechanic that I use on a lot of Event Cards.  Draw a Cargo Card to choose a random city and then any ship up to 2 spaces from the city at the end of the round will receive damage.  This lets players avoid the area and escape it if they happen to be caught in the area when the storm hits.  This way, if a player takes damage from a storm, in most cases it will be their choice if they want to risk the storm.

The Pirate Bounty, a dangerous way to make some extra cash. 

To complete the Data Sets I needed to include the pointers to the Images that will be on the cards.  Once I had the place holders for the images, I couldn't stand looking at the empty Data Sheet "Fill Space" where the image would be placed when the Data was called.  So I got to work on inserting the image references into the Data Sets.  Even with the much faster process for creating the Art Images, it is very time consuming trying to find images that fit the theme and time period, and are free and/or Public Domain.  This is why it is always good to make a game themed to a fictional setting so you don't need to worry about being historically inaccurate. 

This photo for Ship Upgrades does not look right and will be changing.

It is very difficult to find images that fit for the cards I need to represent.  It has forced me to choose a few images I am not happy about and will be changing the first chance I get.  This image doesn't fit the other images because its built from a photograph.  This is one of the images I will change when I find a suitable replacement.

Math Bad!

I am going to go out on a limb and say that for any game designer you will have a much better success at designing games if you have a strong background in math.  It helps with more than you will ever know.  Take it from a guy who struggles with math, I waste a lot of time trying to solve problems that can almost always be handed by a moderately difficult math equation.  I end up doing more iteration because I don't do a great job of figuring out the math issues early on.  This leads to some wasted time and frustration.  Learn from me and get a healthy does of advanced math skills before you leave high school or college.

I bring this up because I played Automobile last night and fought myself to pay attention and understand what I needed to do all night.  It's a deep and complex game with lots of statistical and analytical thingking.  Players are trying to build their Auto Manufacturing company by building factories, manufacturing cars, managing Car Sales Men, using the Characters Special abilities (which can change every turn) to their maximum effect.

Bryan (center) teaching the Rules of the game.

You have money that is a lot in the first and second rounds but is gone after that and is near impossible to get back. I made several big mistakes but they were all based on assumptions about how the game worked and how stiff the penalties were.

An unknowing Me, about to get my ass handed to me! 

Late in the first round I used a special phase of the game to shut down my factories and avoiding the penalties I would have got for having the lowest technology Car Factories.  But I didn't do the math to calculate how much money the factories would be making for me and that I could have waited to sell the factories until turn two, making a lot more money.

In the end it came down to math.  The two guys who did the best were the math experts, correctly calculating how many cars they could manufacture and effectively sell, gaining the highest profits, allowing them to buy more factories and sell more cars.

Apparently Bryan doesn't know how to take a non-blurry picture of me.

Automobile is a cool game and I would play it again, but I don't think I would go back to it often.  It is the start contrast to my game, Taipan, which has a fair bit of hidden and random elements.  Speaking of which, I am having a hard time getting the new Data Sheets set up properly.  I have made so many changes that the Cards for Taipan have become so significantly changed on the Data side, that I have to clean up the Photoshop files before they will read properly.

As a bonus, check out this insane pistol that shoots shotgun shells.  This is Ben (Bryan's son) holding the monster of a gun.  That thing is almost as big as he is!

Heres me, a 6'4 reasonably muscled guy having a hard time even holding the thing.  Aiming it causes my hand to wobble from the weight.  Maybe I should have cheated like Ben and used both hands!  ;p