cardilo

Trello link for Cardilo

https://trello.com/invite/b/68cbfc6441ae47c9eadc27a7/ATTI2dacb9ed38c13614925d8d8679368575B2D9E977/cardilo-game my group is robin matthew archie and charlie

trello is a incredibly useful resourse for project management that we will be using for cardilo this is where we wil house our artwork and all the details for our cards thist site will probabaly be used for future projects that i work on

Research on games

we played Marvel Villainous it’s a strategy game mad e by Ravensburg in 2020 it has a player size of about 2 -4 and has an age rating of 12 my favourite.

mechanic with this game was probably the fate deck as it affected all players in the game throughout the round and was interesting in how it affected the game play.

my least favourite mechanic of the game was probably the infinity stones as they took a while to get into play and since they were a main win condition and there where so many of them it felt like it took a long time for them to come in to play as well as the rules were not very clear on when they entered the board however this mechanic wasn't a bad mechanic just badly explained

The Mind:

The mind is a co-op game that is played with 2 - 4 players where the players must play down cards in ascending order without communicating at all this game sounds simple and easy but trust me when your 2 hours in and still haven't got past level 3 of the mind yet you will realise that the mind isn't just a fun little card game to play casually but it’s the ultimate test of how well you know someone by reading nothing but there body language and attempt to read their mind

the mechanics of this game work really well for instance the level mechanic for the game where is your group get past each level the difficulty increases by adding more cards to each players hand so it starts out simple on level one where you all have 1 card and for level 2 you have 2 cards and it increases as you go on getting progressively harder this mechanic works really well however this sometimes makes it easier than harder as there are more cards in play so probabilities increase so while its good it isn’t perfect

another mechanic that works well in this game is the shuriken mechanic where if all members of the group unanimously decide to use it then all players put down their lowest card this works well as there are times in the game were no players are comfortable to put their card down and the group has reached a stale mate however what makes this mechanic work even better as you only have a few uses of it as you go through the levels this is done through an item mechanic where after you complete specific levels you get an item as a reward that being a shuriken to use or an extra life over all the shuriken has to be one of my favourite mechanics in the game

the life mechanic is also well thought out with this game as each time your group makes a mistake the group loses a life rather than restarting instantly you continue off from where you are.

survive Escape from Atlantis:

Survive escape from Atlantis is a board game where you race against the other player to get all of your islanders to a safe shore before the volcano on the island erupts it is a 2 to 4 player game where you must use both strategy and luck to beat your opponents this game can take from around 45 to 60 minutes to play this game .

The mechanics of this game are interesting each meeple that represents a survivor has a number on the bottom the number represents how many points that meeple is worth. At the start of the game you look at the bottoms of each of your meeples and take turns with your opponent to place them on any of the hexagonal land tiles on the board once you’ve put one down you can’t flip it over until the end of the game once all the meeples are put down it turns into a game of strategy and resource management you have to keep tabs on your highest scoring meeples and secure their safe passage of the island while trying to kill your opponent’s highest scoring meeples this makes the game really quite complex and a mind game trying to only lose your low scoring meeples while you might have lost track of which one is which and in the end you realise that you’ve only managed to rescue meeples with a score of 1 or 2.

The Pokemon TCG

the Pokémon TCG is a fun card game that my group found we all enjoy there are many aspects for this trading card game for example collecting, selling, and also playing the game itself.

While collecting and selling are predominantly the most popular aspects of the Pokémon TCG however through events like the Pokémon world, regionals and nationals championships as well as apps like Pokémon pocket and Pokémon TCG live the actual playing of the card game has spiked in popularity in recent years and the Pokémon company have really been trying to make it the most popular aspect of the trading card game. The Pokémon world championships has been going on for a few years now and it’s a large competition where trainers go to compete against each other for the title of world champion in there respected games for a while it used to just be the TCG and the video games but now the world championships include the vgc (video game championship), TCG (trading card game) Pokémon go and Pokémon unite. while the vgc is by far the most popular the TCG is also incredibly popular as well and is what I want to focus on. The Pokémon TCG is played like this each player starts with a hand of 7 cards which are drawn from a deck of 60 cards they then place down a basic Pokémon from that starting hand to the active position and if they choose to they can place any extra ones they have onto the bench if they have no basic cards they shuffle the hand into the deck and draw another 7 their opponent draws another card once this has done each player takes 6 cards and places them face down in the prize area these are also taken from there deck this is the end of set up the aim of this game is to draw all of your prize cards or to knock out all of you opponents Pokémon in play. after the set up each player will take a turn deciding who goes first via a coin flip the person who wins decides who goes first it’s important to note whoever goes first cannot use supporter cards or attack on this turn the other player can the supporter cards can only be played once per turn and your turn ends when you attack or decide to end your turn to attack each card has an energy cost which is the amount and type of energy that needs to be attached in order to do this attack an energy can only be attached once per turn however some cards have abilities that allow more to be attached when attacking you don’t discard the energy attached unless specified on the card however when retreating you do each player takes turns attacking until one player has drawn all prize cards, one plyer has no Pokémon in play or one player starts their turn and can’t draw a card with all these win conditions there is a variety of ways to play the game which I find interesting but also over whelming at times with so many variables to account for so I might just go with one win condition to make it more simple I also like the energy and how they work so we may use something similar in our game.

However a big issue with the Pokémon TCG is the fact that with the collectable side of things it can cost a lot since it’s a living card game which means its ever expanding and also the packs you get you never know what is included in them so more and more sets come out while this is good for money and making a profit it is quite predatory and can result in FOMO and also gambling addiction this is not something we want to include in our game

pokenots:

pokenots is a fan made copy of Pokémon cards with silly doodles as the artwork and verry non serious I like how silly they look, and I think we might do something silly for our artwork as we can probably manage this since we aren’t verry skilled at drawing.

Summary:

in summary of the things we will use from this research we want to try and use a similar art style from pokenots, a few aspects of the Pokémon TCG as a way it will be played and we want it to be a card game similar to aspects of the mind. Parts of our research we don’t want to use are things like a mechanic similar to the infinity stones from marvel villainous and while survive escape from Atlantis was fun it just didn’t have that much of a competitive aspect as other games however I liked the skill of planning ahead that was used

Session logs

Session1:

in the first session of this project we started by brainstorming our ideas which didn’t take long we elected a team leader and I was chosen then we just started talking about what’s on our mind and since id been playing untitled goose game when coming up for a title we workshopped untitled blank game then archie said armadillo and we all got verry excited about armadillos for a bit and decided to make an armadillo game this took about 20 mins and was surprisingly quick for us to get a theme put together but we still were unsure on what type of game and what mechanics we wanted so after a little while about any ideas for the type of game we ended up agreeing that it could be fun to make a card game then we hit another issue not many of us had played a card game other than uno before and we knew we didn’t want to make an uno copy while uno is fun and simple it just wouldn’t be creative to so the question was what kind of card game so for now we set up the Trello page fully and also a discord group for easy communication outside of the sessions then we spoke about some hobbies and realised a lot of us liked Pokémon and I was pretty decently familiar with the Pokémon TCG already so we decided to base it off of that the issue of player count was easy there was 4 of us so in order we could all play in a test play of the game down the line and my main issue with the Pokémon TCG is that I can’t play more than one person at a time so we sought to improve on it

so in summary in this session we encountered several problems which we solved these were what the them would be , what type of game would it be , what would you do in the game, how many players the solutions to these problems for the theme we focused on armadillos for the type of game we went with a card game for mechanics we decided to do something like the Pokémon TCG however our future issues we now have to deal with are how are we going to format the cards how will the game be played another issue is how manty cards will be in play at once what the rules are and what each individual card will be capable of this is a good start but we will need to work hard to realise this project and we will need to research a lot more

Night work 1:

tonight I spent the evening coming up with ideas as for how the game could be played we have a basic theme that is armadillos and we like the Pokémon TCG so I started by coming up with stuff that can fit into that category I also have an alternate idea the others might like as well so I’ll write down a few down so we have options

idea one goes like this we have 1 shared deck of cards and each player starts with 10 of those cards in those cards will be armadillos and some items the aim of the game would be to keep cards in your hand while playing them to cause other players to discard their own cards on each turn a player would draw a card and some armadillo’s would be played with others of a matching type to get more cards

idea two is a bit more refined each [player has a deck of 60 cards the aim of the game would be to eliminate all of your opponent’s active armadillo for an armadillo to be active it needs to either be in the den or the combat position the den can house up to 6 armadillo at a time the combat position can only be active by one each armadillo will have its own armability and two attacks with various requirements for use and for an armadillo to return it would cost some sort of resource probably the same resource that is used to attack similar to energy in the Pokémon TCG the whole concept is based upon the Pokémon TCG however with 3 opponents to deal with it is important to decide who you attack wisely as this would be important to secure victory

I feel both ideas are good but the second is far more developed than the first I’m not sure which one the group would prefer I look forward to presenting the ideas to them they should be pleased I’ve also made a template for the cards of the second idea to the left

Session 2:

this session has been incredibly productive the group liked my ideas we decided to go with idea 2 which makes sense as it was more developed and we’ve made lots of progress with it we will have 4 factions the knights, mages, samurai and mafia we want the game to be silly and balanced so we’ve come up with a bunch of jokes for the names of cards to do with armadillos we all had a lot of fun coming up with names for cards it’s been verry fun we had a great laugh we have also decided to add a den affect card type that will affect all four players and only one can be applied at a time I’m thinking of adding a few affects maybe poison or stun maybe I’m not sure what they will do yet but it seems like a good idea below is a image of some of the names we have come up with a few for the mage faction most pf these are just things we thought were funny as above all for this project that’s what we wanted to do just have fun making a game

Session 3:

in this session we didn’t have many time and half the group were out as they were ill so me and robin decided to spend the session coming up with silly names during our lunch break for cards this was a lot of fun one issue may be is that we have too many cards now and it may be hard to make every one of them feel useful whilst also being balanced but we brushed this fear and worry to the side after all that’s what playtesting is for and since this is only a prototype a proof of concept if you will we aren’t too worried about how we will do this we just know we want to however this issue is still lingering at the back of my mind and I’ll probably think it over for the next few days

Night work 2:

so after last session I’ve been thinking about a few things like how we can make every card feel useful without being too overpowered compared to the other cards and a is was playing the Pokémon TCG in a weekly tournament it hit me one of the best things that make cards useful in Pokémon is passive affects and actions so I dropped out of the tournament I was in and start designing some passive affects to give to some cards I played around with different ideas like maybe a combination mechanic where if you have some specific cards in play you take reduced damage maybe I also toyed with the idea of moves that have no cost but then some cards might have better use cases than others and it might make some cards feel too overpowered so I decided on the third option armabilities we could give each card its own one some for energy acceleration some for other functions

Session 4:

in this session we started designing the cards on the Trello page this took a while as each card had its own section on the Trello page but I think this was a good thing to do as it helped separate the cards out and see how much we had left to do we developed a template after a while which was quicker than doing it manually for the older ones however this does mean that some of the details are in different order for some cards which might be an issue later but hopefully not another issue that might turn up is the art work as none of us in the group are that talented artists so we can’t really do anything hugely impressive or detailed maybe we could do something silly

Session 5:

today’s session we started to tackle the art issue inspired by pokeroots we are going to do silly doodles as art these would probably change if we were to do a full release but will work for a proto type Archy is doing these and I’m really happy with how they are turning out so far he’s done a great job while he was doing artwork me robin and Mathew carried on with making the cards during this session we also talked a lot about our den affect cards as we wanted each one to do something different and all feel useful but we couldn’t really get the balancing done well enough while they all affected everyone so we decided to change how they worked from affecting everyone to only affecting the faction that played it down and then having them only last for a few turns

Session 6:

in today’s session we finished off making the cards with their moves and armabilities while Archie carried on with artwork in this session me and Robin realised we need to figure out what the deck sizes will be and how many copies of each card there will be me and Robin ended up deciding on a deck size of 60 cards in total so we worked on deck lists for each faction meanwhile Mathew developed a template for the cards to be printed out onto this was due to an issue that we discovered this lesson that all the cards came out to different sizes this was an issue as if the cards were different sizes there would be issues with shuffling while this is a prototype we do want the cards to feel nice while they are used we also hope to laminate these cards with backs however this may not be possible as with 4 decks of 60 cards that makes 240 cards in total might be just too many to get all of them laminated and have printed backs but hopefully we can get this done its ambitious but hopefully we can get it done

Session 7:

in this session we started work on the rulebook while Archie finished up on the artwork, we wanted to make sure that the rule book was clear and easy to understand as we did not want it to be too large. To do this we made sections in the rule book talking about different aspects of the game we also included a diagram of how to set up from the players prospective for easy understanding one issue we ran into was with the printing when we printed it we realised since we only had 2 sheets we could just print it double sided so that’s what we did however the inside of the rule book printed out upside down to fix this we rotated the back page 180 degrees so both sides were the correct way up on the printout I’m happy with this as I believe it was a creative and simple fix to this issue also this lesson Archy has finished the artwork so next lesson we will be using the template Mathew has made to create all the cards and print them out

Session 8:

in this session we started to create the cards it took a little while to get into a flow state where we could just start churning out cards at a quick rate and during the first few cards we had some issues with font sizes and how the cards would be played out while this is annoying it is a prototype and we are running out of sessions to re do cards at this point we’ve done about half and soon we will be starting to stick the backs on the cards and hopefully start laminating them

Session 9:

during this session we split into 2 teams one team would be finishing off the formatting this was composed of Mathew and Robin while the other would be cutting out the cards and sticking them onto the backs of the cards this team was composed of myself and Archie after Robin and Mathew finished formatting the moved over to our team and helped get the cards stuck together so they were ready to be laminated unfortunately we didn’t manage to get all 240 cards done

Session 10 :

in this session I started to laminate the cards we stuck together whilst the rest of the group carried on finishing off the cards however the laminator got too hot and we were only able to laminate half of one deck this is unfortunate as we have about 210 more cards to laminate and with only until this Friday to do it may not be possible to laminate them especially since we don’t want to stop other people from being able to laminate their own cards for their games on the other hand I did manage to get a box for the game to go in this was bought from the student shop in Zennor and while it is bland if we have a bit more time we may be able to decorate it a bit with some art work

evaluation:

what went well

This project has been an interesting and fun project making my second boardgame was a blast and a I really enjoyed collaborating with the people on my team. II think our game turned out well with most of the cards looking clean and the rulebook looking incredibly professional and well made.

what went less well

this project has had a few issues also with some of the cards printing out badly for examples the bushido and a few others didn’t have attack costs on the card another thing that didn’t go as well is the laminating of the cards wasn’t finished so we have ended up with some being laminated and some not which was disappointing but unfortunately unavoidable with the laminator breaking one of the main things that I’m not 100 percent happy with though is that some of the cards are formatted slightly differently with font sizes another thing that I’m not fully happy with is the art work while it is really good and the style we were aiming for I don’t think the armadillos look that much like armadillos

what would i change

if I were due this project again I would want to spend more time on the formatting of the cards to make sure all the font sizes were the same and the layout was also the same and I also think I’d spend more time on the artwork and the card sizes are good as some of the item cards and den affects look a bit empty I would also when it comes to the printing stage ensure each card is triple checked for things like retreat costs etc

What would need to change to go to market

if we were to take Cardillo to market I think some of the earlier artworks would need re doing as we didn’t really have the style we wanted yet we would also have to rework some of the parts of the game as stun is quite unbalanced and the mafia lacked a decent amount of insect acceleration we would also need to laminate all the cards or maybe use some higher quality paper for them as without the laminations they are a bit flimsy and the cards format would need to be fixed so all the font sizes are the same we would also need to make sure all the cards are checked for any missing text like the attack costs that few cards are missing and the box should also get some artwork as well as some details like deck lists on the bottom

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