Not every card I designed for Crazier Eights: Avalon made the final cut. This type of thing is commonly due to cards being too complex or powerful, or because there are certain other abilities needed for a set as a whole. In this case the cards were mainly rejected because I already had so many Arthurian-inspired assets that I wanted to use and they were not inspired enough from the legends. Let’s take a closer look at three of these rejected cards. Continue reading
Category Archives: crazier eights
Legends of One Thousand & One Nights
Shahrzad’s One Thousand Nights & One Night has many familiar legends and characters, such as Aladdin and Sinbad. As the game designer of Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights, it’s my job to decide what each character should do in a way that makes some amount of sense. Let’s take a closer look. Continue reading
Legends of Avalon
Who are the legendary characters from Crazier Eights: Avalon? As a game designer it’s my job to try to give them abilities that make sense. Let’s take a closer look and see to what extent I succeeded. Continue reading
Legends of Camelot
Crazier Eights: Camelot features legendary characters inspired by the King Arthur stories. As a game designer it’s my job to try to give them abilities that make sense at least to some extent while simultaneously making those abilities useful for the game itself. Who are the legendary characters from Camelot? Do their abilities make sense? Let’s take a closer look. Continue reading
David Wiley from Carboard Clash reviewed Crazier Eights: Avalon, and he liked the game! Go Rejected Camelot Cards
When trying to tune a card game through updates and playtesting there’s a good chance a lot of the cards won’t make the final cut and will be replaced. There are a lot of cards that didn’t make the cut for the final version of Crazier Eights: Camelot. Some of these cards are really perfectly good and interesting, but they might not have been needed for one reason or another. Let’s take a look at some of these cards: Continue reading
Game tuning & playtesting
Tuning a game requires that you try to improve it through an update. It is important to tune a game several times. I also recommend game designers make multiple significantly different versions of a game to check what works best. How much should a card game be playtested and updated? There is no easy answer, but I can talk a bit about how much Crazier Eights has been updated over the years. Continue reading
Counter-Balance in One Thousand & One Nights
When developing every version of Crazier Eights I want to make sure the set of cards is balanced. When you think of a card game’s balance, you might think of the balance of particular cards. Are any of them too strong? That is a concern, but a more important and interesting concern is the balance of the game overall as a whole, which is a bit more difficult to discuss and examine. Still, it is an incredibly important issue, and it is the issue I will focus on here. In particular, I will discuss a bit about how I tried to make sure Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights is balanced through counter-balance. Continue reading
I will be at GobbleCon
I will be at a protospiel event at GobbleCon on Friday November 24th from 2:00 PM to 8:00 PM (at Burlingame, CA). I will bring high quality prototypes of multiple future versions of Crazier Eights for playtesting.
The main concern is tuning the games at this point to play as well as possible. How long it takes to play the games is one issue in addition to keeping the sets properly balanced and elegant to at least some degree. Continue reading
What’s Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights?
The One Thousand & One Nights were Shahrzad’s stories, also known in the West as the Arabian Nights. They include stories of famous men, such as Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba as well as many lesser known yet very impressive women.
Crazier Eights: One Thousand & One Nights is a stand alone version of Crazier Eights inspired by these stories. Every card has a new and unique ability inspired by the stories, which could represent a character, place, or event from the stories. Continue reading
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