5 Graphic Design and Typography Tips for your Card Game
Chris Farrell of Illuminating Games just wrote a thorough critique of card games setting their body text to be so small that they cannot be read at arm's length, let alone across the table. Here's an excerpt, but the whole thing is worth a read for any would-be card game designers out there. (Myself included.) Break out your copy of the base set of Dominion, and look at the Chapel. This has a text box roughly 3.5cm by 4.5cm. It's got a single line of text. That line of text is 1 (one) millimeter high. 1mm! For me, it's only clearly readable at half an arm's length even in the bright light of day. (...) Compare this to a more sane game like Glory to Rome, where the font size is 2-3 times as large (text is 2mm high, keywords 3mm and usually highlighted). I can generally read Glory to Rome cards across the table, and can certainly see the important keywords. To heap insult upon injury, not only does Glory to Rome have far more legible text than Dominion it also has...
Playing without Twitter. 140 characters is far too few!
ReplyDeleteI don't want to try and ham-fistedly explain the terms that put me off because I start to sound trite. A lot of people like the work in ancient language that White Wolf put through, but looking up "ithakur" each time someone mentions it puts me off the game.
This could be why it took me years to accept american football, but I understood soccer right away. Because of this, soccer is my preferred spectator sport, even in a town where football is king.
I really groove with terms that evoke, even through onomatopoeia, the game rules or game's mythology or theme. "Tap" is a classic, because it's both a physical maneuver and has meaning for the action. Continuum does have a good handful of these, but it does get to the point where you are "shrivving the burnback" (not a real example), or using terms that are necessary and technical but do not work to bring more context or understanding.