I discussed how I worked on games similar to Crazier Eights for about ten years before I published it as my first official game here. The version of the game I had at that time did not end up being the final version either. Additionally, there also was a lot of playtesting and changes to the game that were not discussed just over that year, and it has continued over the last couple of years. The newest version of the game Crazier Eights: Camelot is based on a version of the game I developed in 2013, and I have been working on it for a few years. There were five main versions of what ended up as Crazier Eights: Camelot, which I will discuss here.

First Version (November 2013)

The first version looked similar to what it ended up looking like, but it did not look as good. It used similar card frames and suit symbols. I originally used different colors: Green, red, blue, and yellow.

Some of the cards had requirements, such as Gerrymandering shown above. However, there were too many cards with requirements and they tended to be too difficult to play.

The rules were also somewhat different originally. It used to be that you drew a card when you played the card for the effect. I decided it was better to draw a card at the beginning of the turn. It could be even more confusing to play a card and draw a card when the effect of the card also caused you to draw cards.

Second Version (January 2014)

The second version of the game was very similar to the first version, but I used all public domain art and the look of the cards was improved. Immortality and Supernova are a couple of the cards that had requirements, and they were way too hard to play.

Stone Giant shows that the eights did not have  a unique look or particularly powerful ability. I underestimated how powerful eights were as wild cards, so I had to have a better incentive to play them for the effect.

Advanced Crazier Eights (April 2014)

The Advanced version of the game reflected that it was a little more difficult because of having a greater variety of cards than the First Edition, but I decided that it might scare people away who would be worried that the game might be complex when it’s actually simple. By this time I used the draw step before you played or discarded cards.

One other major change with this version is that I did away with card requirements to simplify things a bit. I do like having cards with requirements that can be more powerful, but I also like the option of keeping things more simple.

Second Edition (July 2015)

The Second Edition had the new look. The cards were now purple, orange, green, and blue. Cards were no longer red or yellow. I also put the rank and suit on the top left corner to help you keep an eye on that information when fanning cards in front of you. The look of the cards were also changed by doing away with the title area.

Also note that “permanents” became “assets.” Someone argued that permanents were not permanent enough because they could be destroyed.

Crazier Eights: Camelot (September 2015)

I decided to strengthen the King Arthur theme and put a lot more Arthurian characters, places, and events in the game. I also decided to include a multicolor card, as can be seen above. My plan is to have a multicolor card in every version of the game from now on.

Note that I not only think a strong theme is more appealing, but that the name “Second Edition” was likely to turn some people off because they might feel like they need to get the First Edition first.

An example

There were a lot of changes to various cards and I can’t show them all here, but I will show how the green ace changed from a Galaxy to Avalon. Take a look:

The art for the original Galaxy card was by Lev Sevitskliy.

Related: Game tuning & playtesting