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Alternately, a box of gubbins is much nicer to buy and fiddle with than a pdf.

Sure. It is also much harder and expensive for an indie guy like me to produce.

That's less a function of cards and more a function of individual company setup and what resources a firm has for investment, production and delivery.

If you never look at doing cards you won't have the setup for cards so you won't build games that require cards and the subject of including them or not is a touch moot because you won't be doing it anyway.

There's plenty of short-run producers in China, notably boardgamemaker.com. They do lovely cards.

Sounds like you are all set for what you want then. I wish you the best of luck and look forward to your game with cards.

 Easy E wrote:
Cards are great, but I never use them for a simple reason.

Cards are a barrier to getting a game completed and in the hands of players. They are another piece of logistics that I need to build and coordinate, create the distribution channel, and figure out how to get the to people.

I hate to say it, but anything that can stop a game from being completed and put in the hands of players I tend to ditch. That includes bespoke components, a lot of custom chits, cards, boards, or special dice. I know tools and providers for all of this things exist, but it is another piece of post-production to manage. Words are cheap and easy to distribute in this day-and-age. That is my preference as an Indie guy.

Afterall, you can't be a game designer if you never get a game in people's hands.

Well, to this point all I've done is sell rulebooks, so I'm not an expert, but... a friend of mine did get custom cards made for a game of his and the process seemed fairly easy. I think a lot of it depends on how essential you find it to the design.

His game WAS a card game, that's what he set out to make and that's what he got. Someday, I hope to have some card-driven boardgames, but first I need to carve out some free time to work on them. :(

Yeah, I know a few folks that have done it as well. They commissioned the art and had the cards printed.

To be clear, I am not saying it can not be done. There are plenty of printers out there. I am saying it is an additional challenge to getting the game finished and in people's hands. Same with other gubbins like custom dice, templates, measuring devices, etc.

Therefore, I try to avoid using them as one of my personal design goals. I am more than happy when other people use cards and gubbins.

As a consumer I'd much rather buy a box of stuff than a rule book. I feel like there's much more product design involved in a box of stuff than just a rule book. So I think it's good to replace complex rules with objects people can play with.

I think there's always a balance in these things. Some rule systems really don't need much to make them work; others do. So as long as the rules take into account the scale of information tracking and what tools the creator is making accessible then that's the best approach.


Also even if you don't create your own assets nothing stops you linking/referencing toward generic market options within the rules. This might be as simple as saying "use a D6 to mark wounds taken on a model".
If you're selling you could even link to partner stores that sell those kind of accessories or find a deal that lets you get generic items to sell etc...

My point being that implementing mechanics using objects takes a lot of the mental weight off of users/players and gives them something to fiddle with; how a mechanic is implemented makes a difference. A deck of 12 cards instead of asking players to roll 1D12 on a table, for example. Either way they get 1/12 results, but the context, as explained, is really different.

Although yeah, cheaping out on production is very affordable. Not a knock. I don't have $40,000 in production costs to produce and ship 1,500 copies of anything I make either.

Nomeny wrote:
My point being that implementing mechanics using objects takes a lot of the mental weight off of users/players and gives them something to fiddle with; how a mechanic is implemented makes a difference. A deck of 12 cards instead of asking players to roll 1D12 on a table, for example. Either way they get 1/12 results, but the context, as explained, is really different.

Although yeah, cheaping out on production is very affordable. Not a knock. I don't have $40,000 in production costs to produce and ship 1,500 copies of anything I make either.

I want to touch on this deck of cards instead of rolls because i have practical examples.

The ttrpg i last ran was Forbidden lands. Forbideen lands has a lot of content tables. Usually d66 (the game primarily uses d6s so a d66 is like a d100 but with results of 11-16 21-26 etc etc... for 36 possible results).

So i made a loot deck with all 6 loot tables on 1 card for whatever reault. And a critical injury deck for all 4 critical injury tables on each card. And a travel mishaps on one side and random encounters on the other so i just flip the deck and cut it to draw depending on what i need.

The benefit isn't simply the feel of drawing a card instead of rolling a dice. I no longer need to flip through a book and reference a chart to get a result. Time went down and ease of use went up drastically.

 Lance845 wrote:
I want to touch on this deck of cards instead of rolls because i have practical examples.

The ttrpg i last ran was Forbidden lands. Forbideen lands has a lot of content tables. Usually d66 (the game primarily uses d6s so a d66 is like a d100 but with results of 11-16 21-26 etc etc... for 36 possible results).

So i made a loot deck with all 6 loot tables on 1 card for whatever reault. And a critical injury deck for all 4 critical injury tables on each card. And a travel mishaps on one side and random encounters on the other so i just flip the deck and cut it to draw depending on what i need.

The benefit isn't simply the feel of drawing a card instead of rolling a dice. I no longer need to flip through a book and reference a chart to get a result. Time went down and ease of use went up drastically.

That's brilliant. I love it.

There is a way to break out of the "expense trap" and that is to make a card game for use with traditional playing cards. That's what I did - face cards represent supplies, number cards combat strength, etc. By combining multiple decks, pulling certain cards, you can create the same effect and my "players" in the military caught on pretty quickly (and really liked using Jack Daniels branded playing cards while on duty).

Having them roll on a table would not have gotten the same degree of buy-in. When I broadened the scale and needed more markers, the choice was obvious: poker chips.

Yes, the ideal is having everything in the box, branded to you, but there's something to be said for just selling a pamphlet for a "kit" game.