Got a couple card games I want to remake/retheme. These particular games are nice because they use a tiny number of cards, so I don't have as much work to do. Hooray for laziness! Plus the games sound really cool anyway, so thats nice.
First game is called
Coup. Even
Rock, Paper, Shotgun talked about it. I've read the rules and the thing that stuck out to me is with all the bluffing going on it reminds me of liars dice or poker. Which reminded me of Red Dead Redemption and westerns in general. So lets dump this dukes and royalty kind of theme and make it a western!
First I had to think of different roles. The Assassin is now the Outlaw, the Captain is now the Saloon Girl, Contessa is the Sheriff (this makes sense thematicially. Sheriff stops Outlaws from killing anyone.), etc. One role I haven't totally decided on is the Duke. He takes 3 gold from the pot, and can block others from taking some gold from the pot. I thought a banker? Old western mayor? I don't know yet. Right now I'm going with banker. (EDIT: I'm also going to replace gold with poker chips.)
So anyway, there are only 5 roles, and 3 copies of each card in the deck. Thats it. So 5 cards. So then I started working up the design of the cards. My original thought was to steal the pause menu effect of Red Dead Redemption, that really high contrast red/black look. Find some old western photos that would match the characters and do that to them. Thats when I hit a snag...finding those photos. I just wasn't finding what I wanted and don't really have the patience to load all those photos, you know? So I threw that idea out (even though I did come up with a way to create that effect on photos. Kinda fun.) I also toyed with a wanted poster style of art but again, no photos.
So idea 2 was paintings, go look online for art that was like what I wanted. Ran into the same problem. If I found something that might work it was always a one-off piece of art so it was impossible to find something else that matched it. Bummer. If I could draw I'd do it all myself but hey...
Idea 3 was something I knew I could do: icons. Something that simply represented the character. Sheriff is a star, Saloon Girl a heart, the Gambler is a spade, Assassin is a target, and Banker so far is a coin. These icons are then put inside a circle, which is inside a square (you'll see in a second). I sorta prettied up the corners simply with copies of the icon again.
Ok, now the fun part. Can't leave these just the stock shapes out of the vector program. Would be too clean for a western. So I had to fiddle with a couple ideas. Going off the kind of wanted poster idea I first tried this:
Was just a quick test. Yes I know I misspelled Sheriff. It looked pretty nice but I wanted to try some more ideas out before I decided. I was thinking...what else gives you that western cowboy feel? Old fence posts, wood, leather, branding...
How about wood burning? Kind of like branding on wood. That would look good with the icon style. So here is attempt 2 (yes, I misspelled Sheriff again):
Ah ha! I like this one. I found a photoshop tutorial for the effect and have been doing my best to recreate it in GIMP. I think what I'm going to do is remove the name of the card at the top and shift the icon up to be big and bold on top. Then on underneath it make some old paper thats pinned/nailed up underneath with the card name and ability. Keep it readable. Once players memorize the abilities you'll only need to see the icons anyway.
So thats where I'm at. Once I have one card done, switching in the other icons will be easy and then just running the effects over them and changing the text. Then I can work on the 2nd game. And then the 3rd and then print em all off on one deck and have 3 games out of it!
