Daniel Solis

As a little weekend hobby project, I was thinking about how some of the concepts and visual language of Marvel SNAP would translate into a printed card.  Very quickly, this spun out into its own concept. I imagined the cost and strength would both have to be locked to the top left for ease of reference. I minimized the cost icon to be less prominent since you'd rarely have to look at it while it's in play. The basic, ongoing, and reveal abilities ought to have distinct backgrounds so you could quickly scan the board for triggers.  The artwork here comes from "Aguila Negra" (Black Eagle) issue #100, a Portuguese language comic from 1966 that is now in public domain. I loved that this guy wearing a full knight costume would don a disguise OVER his costume, including sunglasses over his mask and a fedora over his helmet! Quite a snappy dresser indeed! You can download this Photoshop file at the Patreon post linked below.  » https://www.patreon.com/posts/82651355 This inc...

Here's a little InDesign goodie for you this week. It's a complete paragraph style with GREP strings that automatically turns text into colored euro-style cube icons.  Red cube is [R] Orange cube is [O] Yellow cube is [Y] Green cube is [G] Blue cube is [B] Indigo cube is [I] Violet cube is [V] Black cube is [K] White cube is [W] Just type the code and the icon magically appears! Here's a video tutorial showing it in action. Download "Eurocube" paragraph style and font kit [Originally published February 22, 2017]

Here's a card design template inspired by the sci-fantasy aesthetic of digital CCGs that was popular a few years ago. You get layered TIFs of each card design with five different colors so you can toggle the name bar, sidebar, and text window. You also get the original PSD complete with every original layer and the original vector INDD wireframe design. Download "Star Duel" Card Design Template [Originally published on Patreon October 26, 2016]

By popular request, here's a Koi Pond tuck box available for free download. It's sized to accommodate the complete basic Koi Pond deck, plus wiggle room for your card sleeves. Below are two PDFs. The first has the art and guides on one page. If you're feeling fancy, the second link has the art on one page on its own with the guides reversed on the second page, so you can print this PDF double-sided and have a nice clean finished product. » Tuck Box with Guides » Tuck Box with Guides on Other Side

Happy holidays! This season, I thought I'd give something to anyone interested in designing their own card games. You may recall I posted a hodgepodge collection of tutorials I found regarding the use of InDesign's DataMerge feature to automate much of the card layout process. I plan to make a video tutorial of my own soon, but for now here's a .zip file with a very basic example of a DataMerged deck of playing cards. [DOWNLOAD] Open DataMergeExample.indd in InDesign CS6 or DataMergeExample.idml in older versions of InDesign. You'll find empty text blocks and image blocks. It looks like there's nothing there, but there is! These are placeholders for the text and images that DataMerge pulls from the the .CSV found in the Assets folder. When you check the Preview checkbox in the DataMerge panel, you'll see each of these placeholders populated. (BTW, I just used a default font for Mac: Times, which can be replaced with Times New Roman if you wish.) /AS...

If you ever need a source of vector icons for your board game prototypes, I highly recommend The Noun Project . They have an extensive crowdsourced collection of vector icons released on public domain or Creative Commons Attribution licenses. You can now also purchase attribution-free licenses for a nominal fee. There are some gaps in the collection when it comes to common game icons. There is a meeple , but a very limited supply of di ce and definitely no "victory points." I just uploaded an icosahedron , better known as a the 20-sided die or d20 . I'd love to upload some more generic game icons, but where to begin? What would you want most? I posed this question to my Twitter friends and got lots of suggestions. die faces 1-6, ? fan of cards 1-5 players 1-5 tiles in various shapes victory points in various shapes time: 15min, 30min, 45min, 60min… ages players: 1, 2, 3… bid most/least And there were some other suggestions that stretched the boundarie...

Smashing news, true believers! I laid out the latest What If? download for the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game, featuring our not-so-jolly green giant HULK ! Hulk is so big, he smashed the  traditional datafile template, so we had to scoot Bruce Banner's stats to the facing page. This PDF also includes files on the U-Foes, a fun gang of villains for your rogues' gallery. If you dig the new content, tell the good folks at MWP on their forums !

Ernest Pazera just made this great little Java implementation of Minoqaur. You can see an example of it up at the top of this post and download it from his blog here . Here is how to run a .jar file on most OSes. Are you on a mac? You can run .jar files with the Jar Launcher under /System/Library/CoreServices and select it as the default app for .jar files. Ernest also shared two interesting findings: "The sword is so immensely powerful that not picking a nearby starting point seems foolish." The sword is very powerful, but also farthest from the treasure. It takes twice as many steps to get to the treasure from the sword's entry than from the cloak's or key's entries. "I learned looking into QR codes, not all QR codes have the "treasure chamber" until they are a minimum size. Additionally, larger QR codes exist with multiple such chambers." Now that is surprising! If a QR code does not have a treasure chamber, then place it as far...

For all teachers, parents, librarians who want to incorporate Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple into kids' learning: Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause returns to offer tips and learning opportunities while guiding a whole class through the pilgrims' adventure. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games . » Download Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple » Also see the Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Many thanks to Chris Schreiber for offering this suggestion. For any backers who wanted to gift Writer's Dice for the holidays, here's a simple IOU stocking stuffer with a print-and-fold paper version of the dice. The card reads: "We wanted to deliver Writer's Dice before the holidays... BUT the Kickstarter was too successful... AND our workshop won't have enough materials in-stock until January... SO please enjoy these print-and-fold dice for now." Furthermore, look for a mobile app to come out soon. We're figuring out the logistics of how to get the app to all backers for free. » Writer's Dice - IOU Holiday Card

Here's a resource for all teachers, parents, librarians, bookstore staff and who want to incorporate Happy Birthday, Robot! into kids' learning. Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause offers gameplay tips, extension learning advice, and experience guiding a whole class in a single story. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games . » Download Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Above is the time-lapse making-of video for the Bajjutsu badge. This was when it was a simple bi-fold last week, but I stopped recording during the small revisions that came up over the following days. At the end, you can see a quick pan of the current tri-fold version. Also, here's the opening screen as a Bajjutsu desktop wallpaper if you're so inclined. » Music: CC-BY-NC-SA Fun Electronics

As you know, Happy Birthday, Robot! uses special dice called Robot Dice. Creating custom dice is a pretty expensive process, from production to shipping, so that was well outside of our budget. We figured out a possible alternative, though. That's a sheet of vinyl stickers to create your own Robot Dice out of your standard dice. These stickers are vinyl and weatherproof, for those times when you're out in the middle of the woods and you just HAVE to play Happy Birthday, Robot! These stickers are going out to pre-orderers who ordered a signed and numbered edition of the game. Each book has enough stickers to make 14 Robot Dice, which is about as many as you'll statistically ever need. I have enough materials to make a few more sheets. If there's enough interest, I'm bringing some to GenCon, possibly for sale or as a con-exclusive bonus. If you want to try your own, here's a link to the PDF template for an OL32LP label sheet. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/7247...