Topic: Cards: Part Three - with a vengeance

[idolminds]

Yes, more card stuff. The western rethemed Coup is more or less done save for the card back, which I even have a temporary back I could just use. So I figured I should work on another set. Ultimate plan is it get a deck printed containing at least 3 games and take it to the meet.

This time I'm being even more unoriginal. Not only did I not design the game, I also didn't design the art! This one is sort of a special case, so let me explain.

The game is Love Letter, another game played with only a few cards. 16, in fact. Designed by Seiji Kanai, who also designed Master Merchant (that first card set I printed up), Chronicle (bought and played at the last meet), and several other games I have an interest in. Noboru Sugiura does the art and its usually pretty simple but strong, and I love it to pieces. But thats where we run into trouble.

Originally published by Japon Brand in Japan (duh), its kind of an indie deal so getting my hand on a copy would be very hard and very expensive. To make matters worse, another company bought the rights to the game! Normally this would make me very happy, since thats how I got my hands on a copy of Chronicle. But this company also decided the theme of the game fit into one of their existing franchises and changed all the art!

Here you can see the original art. Don't you just love it? Answer: yes.
Here is the new art. It's not bad or anything, but if I had to choose I'd go original.

So the rub is that they are no longer printing the original version. SADNESS! DEVASTATION!

IDEA!

So very lucky that someone posted that photo/scan of the original cards. They are not high enough resolution to print, but I can change that...



Left is mine, right is cropped from the original scan. The clown seemed the hardest to do because of all the colors (yeesh, I need to dial that purple down a bit). The collar was the hardest bit to figure out a good way to do it, but messing with a couple layers of crazy star patterns and then subtracting out the areas I don't need, I think I came up with a good approximation. All colors in the cards need to be done by hand, but I have all the black outlines all set to go. The stuff on the upper left of the card will be redone in better quality and laid over the top.

If I can I'm going to see about adding that kind of watercolor texture to the colored areas if its not that hard. There were also 2 promo cards that I have images of and will be doing those as well, to have a "full set" as it were.

[idolminds]

End of the day.


You might notice that the Princess is different from the one in the image I linked to. The one in the linked image is actually a promo card and this is the original princess card. The other promo for a Prince, so if a bunch of girls are playing they can be giving love letters to him instead. How progressive, Japan.

Hardest parts so far was the clown collar, the wizards hair, and the princess collar. That wizard hair looks really simple but it required a lot of tweaking, and I'm not entirely sure I'm done with it (EDIT: I wasn't. 2 minutes after posting I went in and tweaked it some more.)

4 of 8 cards down then. This is going quicker than I thought.

[Quemaqua]

Class, man. Nice job!

[idolminds]

These came together pretty quickly, all things considered. Next I have to do the back and the text on the cards, but hard parts over. Oh, and the stuff on the upper left, which shouldn't be too hard.



I think the only way I could be more pleased would be to get the original cards.

[idolminds]

Instead of making yet another thread, I'm just doing the next set in here.

So the place I'm getting the cards printed at start with decks of 54 cards. Coup, the western retheme, is 15 cards to play, plus 5 extra for the cheat sheets so a total of 20. Love Letter is 16 cards, but I'm doing the 2 promo cards as well. I could do cheat sheets but it doesn't really need it. So that leaves me with exactly 16 cards left in my deck.

I actually had a few options for games that fit that. R and RR would fit in there, but R reads a bit too much like Love Letter for 2 players, and RR I kind of want to do a retheme of just because I don't totally want to rip off that dudes art style all the time. Plus I had a fun idea for a retheme, and it would be better to do the full RRR version which wont fit in 16 cards.

So then I remembered Khmer. Really simple rules and really simple cards, but it sounded like it would be interesting to play. Cards are dead simple, just two copies each of numbers 1-5, and then six copies of 6. The actual cards are really really simple and I could have gone that way but I wanted some cards that were just a bit more interesting than a big number in the middle.

The game is by a Japanese designer so I kinda wanted to stick with that "theme". There are plenty of "asian themed" fonts out there but just a font was still pretty boring. I wanted something more like the Hanafuda cards but maybe not so...indecipherable ad numbers. Then I remembered the Kabufuda deck! Its always interested me, so why not?

Here is a picture of the kabufuda cards Nintendo makes.

the cards are laid out:
54321
09876

Thats a 10 not a zero, but for most games played with the deck its both. I just said 0 to keep the formatting right. ANYWAY....

All I needed was 1-6, so thats all I made. Maybe I'll do the remaining 4 later if I want to print a full deck of these. So yeah, heres mine:


Sweet, huh? The black outlines wont be that thick, but they will be there. Didn't feel like trimming the bleed area for this image. I did make an alteration. On the #2 card in the original, that japanese lettering spells Nintendo. I changed mine to my first name apparently written phonetically in japanese. At least according to google translate and a "your name in japanese!" web site.

So all card fronts are DONE. Card back for Love Letter is DONE. Havent decided on the final back for the western game or this last set. This one will probably be something simple, maybe just a flat color or a very light repeating pattern. Western one I don't know if I want it to have "WANTED" on the back. "LYNCH"? Or just blank with the plain wood? WHO KNOWS?

[Quemaqua]

Damn, dude, you're a machine. They look great.

[idolminds]

Thanks! I actually got all the images uploaded to PrinterStudio. Though I'm looking at that last set of cards and the rounded corners don't really match what the cards actual rounded corners will be. I'm going to tweak that a bit (super simple), maybe just go straight up sharp corners. But its 2am so I'm not going to make that decision now.

As for the card backs, western cards are getting the plain "unburned" wood and the last set is getting straight black. I tried a couple different designs for the backs but none of them went with the minimalism of the fronts the way I liked. And traditionally the cards just have plain black backs so who am I to argue?

[idolminds]

I got kinda lucky. Today was the last day of their site-wise 40% coupon code. So I hurried up and finished everything and got my order in. Went with their new "premium" linen finished cards. Will be interesting to see the difference. Just over $11 shipped.

[Quemaqua]

Awesome, can't wait to see the end results.

[idolminds]

Your wait is over!

Western Coup!



Love Letter!



Khabamerfuda!


The finish on the cards is really nice, and they aren't much more expensive compared to the regular cardstock. Definitely worth it.

[K-man]

Those look really nice, Idol.

[idolminds]

Thanks! I'm really happy with how they turned out. Can't wait to actually get to play with them.

In other news, PrinterStudio just added mini cards! 1.75" x 2.5", which is cute. Also, they are pretty cheap ($5 for a deck of 54). Works out in my favor since I've been doing some legwork on a custom hanafuda deck and those are traditionally small cards. They also have Large cards that are 50% larger than the regular sized deck, and a tall/narrow tarot sized card. Man, so much fun to be had.

[Quemaqua]

That's awesome, man. They really did turn out nice. I'm impressed.