In preparation for running a Kickstarter, I’ve been planning on giving some copies of No Honor Among Thieves to friends who’ve moved to far-away cities for some blind playtesting. After that I’m planning on sending copies out to reviewers, so that it’s not just one guy and his friends saying that the game is good when the time comes for people to put money down.
I’d previously done my card prototyping with makeplayingcards.com. The cards they gave me were of really great material, and have held up well over the course of my extensive playtesting with them. My only complaint was that the colors printed a lot darker than I expected, which made the Defense and Character card background ending up looking the same, and that they only did cards–I couldn’t get the larger Objective mats from MPC.
That’s not a problem with the latest games that I just had delivered to my door. The Game Crafter, which I used to get the Objective mats for my previous prototype, printed those exactly like the files I sent, so I figured they would be able to do the cards just as well. So I ordered the next prototype from them, which included the cards, Objectives, and Coins. The dice I got elsewhere, since the Game Crafter doesn’t do engraved dice. No matter what I do, it seems I can’t get everything I want in one place.
Today, a big box was dropped at my front door, and I got to see and feel the results of all my hard work. And it is gorgeous.
The sides of the box are a little weird because I guess I didn’t understand how the template I was using was going to put it together, but hey, that’s why I ordered these before making the big order of stuff I plan to send to reviewers. I’ve got time to correct those little mistakes. And honestly it doesn’t look bad with all the text on the top half.
I hope you’ll forgive me for making what is essentially just an unboxing post, but I am so excited to see this. Look at it. Look at the coins and the cards and the art. Look at the dice. I am so proud of this stuff.
Box looks a little empty, though, I’ve gotta admit. I think I’ll try to get a smaller one for the next printing. I had to take a good amount of padding out of the box before taking this picture.
Look at these bright colors. No confusion between Defenses and Characters here!
While I do like the basic design of the cards I have now, I think I might want to try and figure out if I can make the types of cards more visually distinct when you’re looking at them from the front. At the very least different shades of paper and different borders.
These look good, though. Really good. It’s a bit of a different style from my last prototype, and I think they fit the style of the art better now.
As for the physical cards themselves, the cards that the Game Crafter sent me are a little flimsier, a little less sturdy, than the ones I got from MPC. Maybe I ought to have gone for the 3-cent-per-card upgrade to linen materials for them. Whatever the reason, I’m glad that I’m just using them for review copies and not actual production, because I don’t think these cards could stand up to particularly hard use.
The Objectives and Coins look good too. The Objectives I already knew looked good–I didn’t actually change their designs from the previous version, because why would I? They looked great. The Coins I’m especially proud of, coming out so well for something I threw together almost as an afterthought. I just used the coin design from the Objectives and changed the colors around a bit.
Man, that Merchant art makes you want to steal from him, doesn’t it? Look at that sneer.
Yeah, it turns out I can fit everything you need for the game (except the rules, I still need to print those out) into half of the box that the Game Crafter recommended for this many components. Definitely needs a smaller box.
I’ve got four of these new copies of the game (you can see the old prototype in the background here, with its fancy treasure chest that can’t actually fit the Objectives in it), and I’m planning on taking all of them to Boston with me when I go down for PAX East in order to give them to various people I’m meeting there–a few people who live in the city, and one guy who’s flying in from Seattle and who is one of my only college buddies who hasn’t played NoHAT yet because, like me, he graduated a year before all of our friends who were in five-year engineering programs.
It’s going to be great to see everyone again. And it’s going to be great to have these in hand when I do.
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