Monarch Wars: Elizabeth's Wrath

[Novelty]

According to wikipedia:

Holy Roman Emperor, King of Bohemia, Margave of Moravia, King of Bohemia, Prince of Piombino, King of Hungary, King of Croatia, King of Slavonia, Archduke of Austria, Emperor of Austria, King of the Romans

How about just Rudolf II - Emperor of Austria ?  If he wasn't HRE, he would probably be known by his greatest title, which I presume would be Emperor of Austria.

[Whaleyland]

Actually, he wasn't Emperor of Austria until 1804, when Napoleon had all but annexed the majority of the Holy Roman Empire. So that title doesn't work unfortunately. Otherwise, I would agree entirely, but sadly, it doesn't apply for another 219 years.

[Novelty]

Ouch, sorry, my bad.  I know nothing about European history.  Go with King of Bohemia and Hungary then.  Use Archduke of Austria as his game text which gives him a leg up on becoming the HRE

[Whaleyland]

I nearly forgot to keep everyone here updated on my new card game: Monarch Wars! I've been fairly busy with numerous things lately but in some of my spare time last week, I updated, improved, expanded, and largely finalized the look of my Monarch Cards for my card game. The other cards also need to be updated, but I am working on a Print-and-Play version for my family to playtest at the moment and so haven't gotten around to updating pretty much any card except Elizabeth I • Queen of England & Ireland. Her card is pretty much done. Thus I present to you all a preview of my card. I would appreciate any feedback on its design since that is my main focus with the cards themselves right now. Don't worry too much about rules and specific functions on the card, those are still in the works (or at least getting worked out). Thank you in advance for any comments you leave, positive, critical, or informative!

[Gantry]

my one suggestion would be that if you have these at typical card sizes, the fonts may be extremely difficult to read. If this is the case, perhaps shrink the photo and increase the font size.

[Whaleyland]

my one suggestion would be that if you have these at typical card sizes, the fonts may be extremely difficult to read. If this is the case, perhaps shrink the photo and increase the font size.

Actually, all the fonts are 12 pt and I made sure to keep them that way. Most card games are 11 pt or smaller, I believe, so I think I'm good in these regards. Shrinking the photo...that's actually the one thing I cannot fix yet. I have no optional border design for photos that don't fit inside their frames. Elizabeth fits fine, but I have two that are just pretty much heads with no bodies, and the heads are a bit (big bit) on the large size. I was able to Photoshop an extended frame for one, but the other you can practically see pimples on.

[Gantry]

What size are the cards, physically? When I make it playing-card sized, the fonts in the red area are barely readable at about 6pt, and the copyright section font looks like it's about 3pt, completely unreadable.

[Whaleyland]

Wow, I just printed out a draft and you are indeed correct, although I think some of the blurriness I can correct. The image was only 72 px/in resolution which could explain why it degrades when printed. We shall see. Either way, I agree now that the text is too small. This just reinforces my initial problem, though, that I still have no frame mechanic for the image itself. I will have to shrink them all now to allow for more text space, but that means shrinking the images which causes problems when the images' widths are not longer than their heights (which none of them are). Any suggestions for a frame?

[Gantry]

You could crop instead of shrinking the images

[Whaleyland]

You could crop instead of shrinking the images

No amount of cropping will make these suckers readable! I've been working for the past month or so to get the mechanics worked out...dropping some ideas and adding others. The Risk (formerly Action) and Experience (formerly Trait) Cards are quite adaptable to new font sizes. Only some resizing is necessary, not too much work, really. The Monarch cards, though, are suffering so I need to find some other ways to get the same message across in less space. I've decided that the Monarch Card bios will be shorter and only reflect a specific aspect of the monarch, specifically the function of their Level 2 Ability (now known as Political Ability). I've removed nationalities and decided to standardize the Monarch Card colors relative to geographic location (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, Central Europe, Middle East). This makes choosing colors and color-matching much less of a burden. I currently have 22 colors for 24 monarch cards and some cards don't look very good because of it. Finally, I successfully balanced all the cards. All Level 1 Abilities (now known as Warfare Ability) require only 1 Experience Card to use, and there are 4 monarchs for each of the 6 experiences. All Warfare Abilities also do the same thing now...no more changeability based on life-span, as I had before. All Political Abilities have been created based on the 6 experience types as well, but all monarchs require 4 experiences of various arrangements to use the ability, meaning that 24 monarchs X 4 experience slots each = 96 experiences slots that must be divided evenly between 6 experience types = 16 uses of each specific experience type throughout the expansion. In other words, between the 24 Monarch Cards, every experience type is used 4 times in the Level 1 abilities and 16 times in the Level 2 abilities. This makes the game very even in regard to the most important component.

That probably was all jibberish to everyone including me. I'll get some beta rules posted soon and after I run through a few playtests to balance certain elements, I'll even provide some printable samples of the game if anyone is interested. I've currently got the game on a .doc file with no images, which provides an easy printing and editing sample.

[Whaleyland]

Well, after three playtests with three evolutions of the rules, I determined last week that Monarch Wars needs an entire conceptual overhaul to properly work. Coincidentally, and unfortunately, all of my cards were deleted when I reformatted my hard drive about two months ago. All of the card samples (in a Word document) survived, so I have that information, but all of my old cards are gone. Very oddly, I backed up my hard drive's documents folder onto two separate hard drives when I backed up, and somehow the Monarch Wars card images in that specific folder did not transfer. Since I have been reworking the rules with my Word print-outs, I hadn't looked into the actual card samples folder until today. It's not all a loss. I have version 3 samples of three cards that were rejected, and I have a full chronology of Elizabeth I of Egland to version 8 on Facebook. All the other information on the cards survived, but the original image files are nonetheless gone. I spent hours on those things and now they are no more. Sad times...

The good news is that my rework is progressing smoothly and properly. The cards will be a lot less complicated and I am taking a clue from Ticket to Ride by giving players three options each turn, of which they must only do one. My game has also moved from a one-on-one trading card game (stylistically) to an alliance game, where each player (up to 4) try to win over all the monarchs to their alliance (or get them to remain/become neutral). Once I run some test games, I'll post the results. I think it will be a much better strategic and entertaining game now. It should also move faster than the earlier version. I'm not investing time into graphic designs for this game until it has been thoroughly playtested, but I still have to spend many hours balancing the cards. All the monarchs will have one bonus that can be used with one of the three options, but I'm not going to work on those bonuses until after the game works mechanically first. More to come...

[CKorfmann]

What ever happened to this?

[Whaleyland]

It's sitting on my computer awaiting an epiphany. Hopefully one will come before too long but I'm not holding out luck. I love the concept of the game and still want develop it but I just am not sure what the best route to go is at this point in time. Whenever I return to it, I will be sure to disuse it here. I'm glad there is still interest.