Buy This Board Game – Update #4, The Beginning of Card Design

After sketching on paper for a couple weeks, we decided we needed something to playtest more frequently with. We wanted to lay out cards in a way that is easy to understand for the sake of teaching the game and getting feedback. Art can come later, if the game develops into something that people want to play.

Card Layout

Each playing card, called a Market Action, belongs to a Market Channel (the deck all Market Actions of a kind belong to). The back of each Market Action card just needs to reference the channel it belongs to, so players can easily shuffle the decks at the beginning of the game and get playing. That being said, the backs of playing cards almost always have no function in games and we want to investigate how we might be able to best use that space. Below, we settled on a sketch of the back of a card.

Then we focused on the front of the card, which should have all the relevant information that players need to make decisions in the game. A sketch of that card is below.

At the top, we put the Market Channel the card came from – SEO in this case – so that players do not have to flip the card over to check its channel. Beneath that, we put the name of the action itself. For a Market Channel like SEO, an individual action may be “Find an Informational Keyword” or “Optimize Local Visibility”. This title has no value in the game, other than to distinguish the card from other cards. At the very bottom of the card, we wanted to add a bit of flavor text describing that term. We do want to include a pamphlet with each game describing what the actions are in real life and pointing players to where they can learn more.

In the upper right corner, we put a box for a recurring benefit, like a future discount on time or money. Putting the discount in that location would allow players to splay their cards in front of them – only showing the discounts which should save on table space.

In the middle of the card, we want to prominently show the cost to play. In the case of our sketch, that card costs $7 and 5 days to execute. In the lower third of the card, where the background changes color, we put a reward in equity (4, in this example). We are hoping the symbology and change in background color clearly distinguishes which elements are costs and which are rewards.

Some cards may have a box on the far right listing another Market Channel – Existing Platforms in this case. In real life, it is common that marketing your product in one channel helps you in another channel. To represent that, we wanted symbiotic channels to be listed on each card such that you could splay right and easily see them. If a player earns a money discount in the SEO category, that player can also take that discount in the symbiotic category Existing Platforms.

Balance

Without extensive playtesting, we won’t be able to tell if our game is balanced. That being said, each card needs some cost and reward values on it. Here’s where we are starting:

First, we developed what seemed like a reasonable range of values for each category. For example, this game is played over twelve “month” rounds to cover a year. Players have access to 20 workdays per month, plus eight weekend days that cause a future penalty. If we want each player to be able to take two to three actions per round, then the average time cost on a card should be 7 or 8 days, where the range is between zero and 20. We made 20 the maximum because we didn’t want any cards in the game that would require a penalty day to play.

As players gain more equity, we want them to gain more recurring money. To start, we arbitrarily chose a 1 to 10 ratio – one recurring money for every ten equity points gained. If we play two to three actions per round, and we want players to gain recurring money almost every round, then the average amount of equity should be three, with a range between one and six.

Finally, we considered the currency cost. We have two ways to balance money in the game – the cost of market actions and the reward of selling games. We want to make sure that on average, selling games nets players more money than it costs them to market the games. If players will earn on average $10 selling a game, we want the cost to market the game to be $10 on average. That represents the player getting back what they paid for, and in addition, gaining equity which results in recurring currency. We set the range for currency between free and $20 to start.

The next thing we did was use Excel to randomly generate numbers for money, time, and equity within the ranges described above. However, if every card in each channel has randomly generated numbers, no channel is truly different from any other channel. So, we then biased the values generated so that each channel is different. For example, a value of +2 time and -$1 was added to the randomly generated time values of the SEO market channel. This biases the channel such that it is slightly more time consuming but less costly than other channels.

After getting the basic layout down in GIMP, we created the example cards below:

We want to start designing Buy This Board Game as a two-player game for the simple reason that it is easier for us to find two players to playtest the concept with than it is to find three or more. If we begin by having seven market channel decks with 25 cards per deck, then we have three cards down and 172 to go!

Time Keeping

After our fourth week, here’s where we stand:

Data as of 7-4-2022