A little card game prototype

I have been working on four or five game projects at once for the last few months, and they are all at various stages of completion. I had been waiting to do an announcement once I had things like, oh, a company name… but this just arrived in the mail today and I couldn’t wait to share it. Shame on me for blowing the “proper” social media marketing plan, but oh well…

This here is a nicely printed copy of a prototype I have been working on. Given the photo, I can’t keep the name secret, so… it’s currently named Rainbow, obviously.

What are my plans for it? I have no idea! I have never done anything professional with tabletop games! All advice is welcome. If it turns out to be fun enough, I might make a digital version of it as well as the card game. As it is, it’s made it past the handmade card stage, and the printed-at-Kinko’s stage.

This version was done at The Game Crafter, a print-on-demand service for game designers. I am pretty happy with the result, though it’s not perfect. As you can see from the close-up, there’s a bit of a registration issue and the top edge of the cards is cut with a little bit of an arc. They do warn that registration is always a problem with POD, and to be very cautious about using borders for that reason. I threw caution to the wind.

The cards feel nicely coated, and deal and shuffle pretty well. Much better than the Kinko’s run, which I did on the punch-out cards available from PlainCards. Those aren’t bad, but they’re just thick enough that I can’t run them through my home printer, and the micro-perforated edges just don’t come out cleanly, leaving cruft on the card edges. I used about half my supply on the the previous prototype, and may end up getting more if I do a card game again as they are handy for interim steps — but printing the full deck at Kinko’s would cost a dollar a card! And no box. In contrast, The Game Crafter version is around $10 for the 71 card deck and box.

They do the tuck box too; it’s the same quality card stock as the cards themselves. I used the 72 card tuck box, and the 71 cards I have are kinda rattling around in there — so it sure feels like the 72 card box holds more like 90. The boxes come shrink-wrapped, too.

I am not going to write anything about the game here right now, because it’s very much in an alpha play testing stage, so you can pretty much assume the rules are going to change. But basically, it’s a very easy to learn set packing game, and you can play it in groups of up to 8, or solitaire. I’ve got rules for both a simple and a trickier version. I also worked up a Blitz mode that I haven’t playtested yet. My wife Kristen can destroy me at the standard game, shaking her head at my boneheaded choices, so that may indicate that there is some strategy to it! We’ll see.