Wow. What a time we have had since last I wrote anything here. It honestly feels like forever. What has happened? Well, if you couldn’t tell from the title, we’ve been doing some play testing. A good bit of it too. The results you ask?
Mixed.
Honestly, we’ve gotten a ton of positive feedback. The truth of it is, we’ve got a gem of an idea. The gem is rough though, unpolished. It’s to be expected honestly. The high level concept of the game, and the general execution has worked out quite well. The true faltering steps though have been things like the name of the game, lack of clarity in the rules, and content on our cards.
Let’s tackle the name first. When we stepped in to the realm of showing the game to others, our biggest fear was that we’d receive some negative criticisms about the game being “Just words on cards”. We had already been vacillating on what exactly to call the game, and so we thought it might be clever to call it “Words on Cards”. Here’s the thing: this created the unintended consequence of drawing comparisons between our game, and a certain other card game. I’m sure you know the one, or at least, you’re very likely to thanks to the inclusion of the word “Cards” in our title.
So what does this mean for us? We don’t want our game to be raunchy or offensive (not that we’re making it childlike or anything) but when people saw the title, that’s what they expected. So, we’re faced with a choice. Keep the name and tweak the cards to fit, or dump the name and come up with something else.
We chose the latter.
So we’ve got a new name, and we’re holding it close for now, as we want to not overwhelm the people we’re asking to test for us, but if you’re reading this blog, you deserve to know. We’re calling it:
Sir Eel’s Wordity Absurdity
How’d that land? We like it. Sir Eel is this fun new character, and somewhat of a mascot for the game. You’ll learn more about him as we develop it further. Just know that he’s a “surreal” guy.
That brings me to the next thing, which is lack of clarity in the rules. Let me tell you something, when you think you’ve got everything laid out nicely, in a very understandable fashion, you don’t. We got questions we didn’t expect again, we got weird rules interactions that we didn’t intend, and of course, misinterpretations. All solid stuff. So back at work on the rules as well. Thankfully, it’s mostly clarifications, and small reworks of certain rules.
The fun part is that every play group has given us an idea about how to play the game slightly differently. It’s allowed us to look at our game in a new way, and consider things that we had previously dismissed. I can’t express how helpful this aspect is.
Last bit to hit on is card content. When we started designing the game, we wrote close to 600 cards. This has now been whittled down to 300, and we’ll see where we go from here. We might adjust up a bit (thanks to production sheets being 54 cards per sheet), but we’ll certainly be amending some cards. Whether it’s a changing of a font that doesn’t read well, or if it’s an entire word or phrase that needs to be swapped out, we’re back at it on the deck.
Our next few days are pretty busy, but hopefully I’ll have a good solid update by the end of this week for where we are at. Spring is still our projected kickstarter, so as long as we can keep up the pace, and find ourselves some solid collaborators in the art and graphic design sectors, we’ll be good to go.
Hope you enjoyed the update, and stay tuned for more!
Even Odds Games 