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...
I have also seen "edging" used in card games in place of "next to", which refers to cards that are touching in a non-orthogonal manner. Of course this could harken back to the discussion about creating new and possibly confusing terms in place of commonly accepted and understood ones.
ReplyDeleteCan you use "edging" in a sentence?
ReplyDeleteAdjacent. With a diagram.
ReplyDelete