Escape from Tag World Devlog 2: Card Design & Playtesting

So I took a few months break from working on this project to work on other projects, but I'm back to working on Operation Linkship, which I'm currently leaning towards calling Escape from Tag World.

I started out by just re-orientating myself and remembering where I had left off. I played a game in Tabletop Simulator and then took some notes on what's next to do with the project. The main notes I had were that it took a long time to build up the decks, so I'm looking to start the decks with a few more cards or provide more Birdians as awards earlier on so you can build your deck faster. Also figuring out ways to track if the player even has enough Birdians or Points to recruit characters in the center so they know how to strategize.

I also started coming up with ideas for names of decks, playing areas, etc. to try and integrate them more with the whole Tag World and Linkship theming. I'm still trying to figure out the best naming schemes, but I have some starting points.

Then I started to work on the symbols for the cards. I had really placeholder stuff there, so I wanted to start working out the details of the symbols to figure out what they'd look like. Some of these are still rough and I haven't transitioned most of these to the actual card prototypes yet. The ones with the question marks are the ones I'm most unsure of and might redo.

I worked on getting the concept symbols for the Birdians, Points, and Alerts on the actual cards in nanDECK and updated the formatting a bit for the cards. I also cleaned up the borders a bit to use shapes. I had another realization that showing a symbol more than once on the Linkship Pilot cards would be more clear than the x2 so I updated those as well. So I saved the cards out to be re-imported in TTS and as individual files.

Then I finally printed the first versions out so I could finally test the physical cards! I playtested a few games, just playing solo first to see how it went. It was a lot easier to test with physical cards as opposed to in Tabletop Simulator, because it was easier to move cards around physically and some of the abilities like searching decks were easier to do with a physical deck.

I also made some notes as I was playing. I wrote on some of the cards to make changes to abilities or costs while I was balancing so I could test those out without having to reprint right away.

I made some edits with changing up some of the colors and also changed which cards the player starts with. I decided to use the alert symbol in the top-left to indicate if it's a starting card and color-coded the top bar depending on which deck you're using. This would make it easier to sort the cards for replaying the game.

I had an idea for a logo to make the T in Tag World kind of like a tree and have a Linkship (or Pidgebeetle) circling around it. So I sketched a few concepts and kind of like the direction they're going, but I'll have to work on it a bit more to make it more finalized and official.

So then I did a lot more playtesting to really try and balance things out. I iterated on a lot of cards, writing on them to make them more balanced, and changing rules on how many cards are in the center Open Shelter area, cards drawn, etc.

I haven't had as much time as I'd like to work on this project unfortunately due to work and other external factors, but I'm glad to be making progress on the mechanics and solidifying those! Since this is a smaller project, I'll probably have a lot fewer posts than last year's project, but I'll continue to update you on how it's going in the posts to come!