Original image lives here. Please look at it and drop a line with your thoughts. Where should the name and/or cardtype containers reside?
I know what conventions will say - keep the fully visible etc, but that put aside - what other thoughts/arguments are there for their placement?
Personally I think I like 3 & 4 the best and I also think they use the areae more efficient compared to the earlier ones.
(and yes, still looking for devs.)
I personally like 4 but most eyes are drawn to the top of the card when looking for a tagline or name. So The more conventional of 5 would work out better.
Of course this is my opinion :D
I'm right handed, like most people I think. If you hold a hand of cards, the only thing you can see of the cards behind the first one is most likely the top left corner. That is why poker cards have all the information in that little corner spaces. Spanish cards do the same with different borders.
I know your cards carry much more info than a 3 of spades but, you have nothing in that spot! You ARE using the top RIGHT corner with the leaf (elven race?) and a number (card level?) to pack some basic info so, I'm wondering if you are not left handed...
Another thought,
You have 2 watermark backgrounds of a map (or landscape). When you use the unit ID text in the middle, that separates both images so you don't notice the difference (1 & 2 a little, 3 & 4 better). If you use the unit ID text in the top (6 a little, and 5 worst), both backgrounds look disassembled.
Finally,
The 4 basic stats at the bottom will be hard to see in you hand. I would place them in a column to a side (right will work better for left handed people). You can fill the empty space aside the creature portrait with that.
Maybe I wasn't as clear as I intended. Print the template in real size, cut it, and hold it all together in your hand. You'll see what I mean. Then, have your grandma try to read the skills description! Size please!
Keep thinking!
PS: this is not a videogame, is it?
if you swapped the corners for standard card indicia, the majority of people would fan them the other way so they're visible without even thinking about it. I like the 3rd template the most, though I agree that my natural inclination is for my eyes to snap to the top of a card for the name... but that's because i've played WAY too much magic in my life.
Well, I don't do fantasy a lot, so I may be a little unaware of what players tend to know or not about their cards. I have recently posted a WWN cards (modern wargame) and I used the aircraft name on the top because modern wargame fans usually know the units BEFORE they play the game. For example, if you see an "F-14 Tomcat" you know you have good air combat and carrier-embarked skill, same with your "P-3 Orion", you know its an anti-submarine flying cow. If you name your basic goblin the "Blood demon of the ninth hell", well, players might get confused.
As for fantasy, I figure that would be different. Meaning that the card faction (elf, goblin, demon, etc) may or may not be relevant if you, for example, have a deck building mechanic. If you have a single demon in your elven deck, the fire icon in the corner can easily point you to him. If all you have is elves, well, the leaf in the most important spot in every card you hold is pretty much useless.
In general, I don't think a boardgame can be designed as a videogame. (wait) I'm talking mainly about aesthetics here, but. The video screen, for example, allows you to forget about how you hold your hand (what part of the card you can easily see), how many cards you can hold at a time, or about spatial distribution (distances mostly). You can have a 10 feet scrolling board with a single deck where 10 players get their cards from. In boardgames, if you have to walk around a 10 feet table to get your cards, or have the deck handled to you by 3 people nearer to it every turn, you are in trouble. As for aesthetics, I think positive/negative printing (I don't know if this is english) or black over white vs. white over black, may be an issue.
Anyway, keep up your good work, and
Keep Thinking!
I think 1A felt easy and direct. Didn't like it when you hid parts of the text behind the graphics. See game content of greater importance than the graphic, although graphic indeed helps a game lots in achieveing atmosphere et.c. But 1A, defenitely.
3 would be my vote
In regards to the number in the corner, for my cards i did swap between top left and right corners, I ended up sticking with top left as "normal" playing card convention stands. Having said that for my game I tend to fan my cards different. Likewise I have seen card games with the stats listed vertically on the left or right hand side, which I assume will require a different fanning to see the cards as well.
If the number is important players will adjust the fan as required, it only really becomes an issue when you have a large number of cards in the hand, and compressing the fan is done to make it more comfortable.
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Thanks for the input. :)
Yes, if a right handed card player actually holds his cards in his/her right hand. I'm not sure that is true.
Now, maybe I'm not the standard person when it comes to holding things "correctly", but I'm right handed, and whenever I play a CCG I usually have the cards in my left hand. Why?
I haven't reflected much over this issue in the past, but my guess now is that since I'm right handed I want to use my right hand to a) tap cards b) draw cards from the deck c) remove cards from play d) put cards in play e) place/remove tokens on table/cards f) in some games - write score etc on a piece of paper.
Curiously enough, many other CCG:s also place their cost in the top right corner (i.e. MTG), so they seem to have the same perspective or at the very least come to the same conclusion as me - that most right handed CCG:ers will hold the cards in their left hand. If not, why then place the cost in such a bad place?
(This all been said, I think the fan-theory, the thought that a player should preferably be able to see most vital info while forming a fan in his hand of the cards, is wishful thinking when applied to CCG:s as a genre: Only time it would work out is if the player had a "perfect fan" in the hand and the game had all vital info on the extreme right half of the card. That is not likely to happen and there is to my knowledge not a single CCG that meets that criteria since a CCG card usually has too much info on it to cram it all in there in a viewable way that works with the fan-theory.
Thus, fan-theory is a wishful thinking in the worlds of CCG that usually lacks real world application: To assess the playability of a card you must either have a) memorized the card fully and exactly (again, happens seldom in worlds of CCG due to many cards and importance of exact wording) or b) see all of it's info when forming a fan, which is hard to acocmplish in a conventional CCG.
Please don't read this as if I would disagree on the usage of fan-theory, I think it's a great concept and that it should be followed in whatever game that is possible and to whatever extent it's possible within each game. In WTactics the placement of the cost in the right top corner is based on it - a huge cumbersome fan would tell a player directly which cards he/she can afford to play during his/her turn. Once that info is given the player can then rapidly filter uot all cards he/she shouldn't consider due to them being unaffordable. This leaves the player with the knowledge, not about which card (s)he should play, but with knowledhe about which cards to consider playing this round. To fully asses them (s)he'd need to view them in full in most cases due to him/her not having a database in the head ;) )
You're right it's the elven species. The number is the card cost. As such it is misguiding maybe, as there is no currency in the game - you can't pay with "leafs" or anything else than whatever we pay in. Maybe this is a problem I haven't thought of until now that you stumbled over it: I have combined the faction logo with the card cost. Personally I don't think it's a huge problem, but it's not logical... hrm... *mutters* (Coloring of faction logo, as the border colouring of the card, i.e. green, shows what alliance the faction belongs to. I do really want to avoid having excessive repeated info on a card and wouldn't want to state what's already obvious by looking at colouring with additional icons saying the same, thus there is no alliance belonging logo to be seen on it rigth now...)
I think it's your eyes playing tricks or me not quite follwing what you mean - it's just one background and it's identic (I hope?) on all the pictures I showed previously. Here it is, cleared from the crap.
Interesting you saw it as two pieces though, maybe should swap it out for something else if this is a common thing.
Sounds very plausible... :) Will fiddle with it.
I think we're either CCG standard or even larger than it in some cases. I'd say the standard is size 10 to 12. We plan on going beyond that if there's space on the template.
It will be playable online, but is not supposed to be a strictly digital game, no. It will try to be designed to work as a real game first and foremost.