Style

It's not enough, in my mind, to make a game that simply is fun. Though that is, in itself, a massive challenge (and one I hope I'm meeting).

A game also has to look fun. What good is a fun game if no-one ever plays it? 

I could cook you an amazing shepherds pie. But if the potatoes were a lurid orange, and the mince was green, I wouldn't blame you for putting it aside without so much as a bite.*

*And even if you did try it, you'd probably find it didn't taste quite right

So, I'm working quite hard to design cards that are pleasing to the eye; while still being easily understood.

The first set of cards I made were most definitely not:

At this stage I wasn't yet certain that Clash of Blades was good enough to be worth putting effort into the card design. Looking back now, it's obvious why it was so hard to get playtesters.

But I did manage to do some playtesting, and as the game seemed to work, I worked on a new card design:

All strikes shared one image, and were red, all defences were silver with their own shared image, and all maneuvers bronze.
I have more art ready for next time. 

While the card looked significantly prettier than the previous ones, it was also barely readable. 

I spent quite a bit of time, and a lot of ink, trying to make the pretty version work. And while I partially succeeded: I realised that it wasn't worth the extra expense. I'm printing new/edited cards quite often: The cost of ink adds up.
This problem is magnified by the fact I'm hoping to recruit Clash of Blades playtesters online, who will need to print the game themselves. If the cards are expensive to print, they won't be printed.

So, I went back to the original style, but with a couple of improvements: ⌚ and  ↻.

The updated template was much clearer than the original set had been, but these cards still weren't pretty. And without the colour cues to tell them which card was of which type, it was much harder for the players to sort through their hands*
*especially as the starting hand size had changed from 5 to 7 due to playtesting feedback

One of the playtesters suggested I should use colour to help people to differentiate the cards... and while my immediate instinct was to tell him "I've already done that!", I realised that that wasn't the point. Sure, I'd done it previously, but I wasn't doing it then, and I should have been. So I mocked up my next set of cards, adding coloured symbols to the top of each.

Not enough colour to be expensive, just enough to be visible.

You may recognise this style of card: It's pretty much the one I showed you in R&R part 1.
I've only made a single change since then, an attempt to make the cards even cleaner and clearer:

By using the sword symbol, I hope to save space, allowing the rules text to be larger, and easier to read, which will be especially important in enabling future adornments, such as art or flavourful quotes from within the Clash of Blades world.