u/RecommendationDry358

Hi again!

I’ve been slowly refining the visual identity of the four factions for my drafting card game, DRA&B - Devils Robots, Aliens & Beasts. And I finally completed the first two, DEVILS and BEASTS.

What I’m trying to achieve is making each faction feel recognizable not just mechanically, but visually too.

The devils ended up feeling more chaotic, with supernatural elements. The beasts are bigger and heavier and for this reason some of them almost turned into full-art cards. They have to look physically too large for the card itself :D

Who’s your favorite character so far?

As always, feel free to throw at me any feedback!

Hi again!

I’ve been refining the four factions of DRA&B, and this time I finally finished the BEASTS faction! I wanted many of them to feel physically too big for the cards themselves, so some of them almost become full art cards just to help sell that sense of scale.

Wanted to share them with you! Which one is your favorite? As always, feel free to give me any kind of feedback

Hi again!

I’ve been slowly refining the four factions of DRA&B, and I finally finished designing all the DEVILS cards. Wanted to share them with you!

Which one is your favorite? And which one would you choose in-game?
Feel free to throw at me any kind of feedback that comes to mind!

Hi again!

A little while ago I shared my first card game project here, DRA&B (Devils, Robots, Aliens & Beasts) and the feedback honestly helped me a lot!

So I finally decided to do the scary thing: share the actual rulebook.

This is still very much a work in progress and I’m currently trying to improve clarity, wording, readability etc.

I’m sharing TWO versions:

A PDF version → mainly for presentation and readability
(it contains visual examples and layouts that make some rules easier to understand)
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Jwpv37Jr5qemhJinRDtSD1uqZ90x1ogc/view?usp=drive_link

A GDocs version → purely for comments and feedback
(I've seen in other post that is easier to get feedback like this, directly on it)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jL5krtuyYhU_TJtmxfEP7ZFZ8t8EEHWqqBAoF95KTSE/edit?usp=drive_link

Just for context, DRA&B is a drafting card game where players build armies of 5 cards by offering each other one visible and one hidden card every turn.
Cards interact heavily depending on positioning, factions, neighboring cards, army composition and a few synergies.

Since the final product will probably be a very minimal card game, I’m also trying to keep the physical rulebook as small and lightweight as possible. Likely a tiny foldable manual included in the box, with a QR code linking to this more complete online version.

I’d especially love feedback on rules, confusing terminology, sections that feel unnecessarily complicated, things that are clear to me but maybe not to a new player. And any misspell, since I'm not native english!

Thanks!
Posting these updates here is slowly making this whole project feel more real

Hi everyone!

I recently shared my first card game (DRA&B) here and got some really nice feedback on the visual design. So I wanted to share a specific design doubt I’m facing right now.

Very very briefly, it’s a drafting game where players build an army of 5 cards. Each card interacts with others in your army (positioning, adjacency, etc.), and factions play a role in how effects work. There are 4 factions: devils, robots, aliens and beasts.

Right now I’m working on the card layout, and I’m unsure how much I should rely on icons versus written text.

At the moment, some cards use faction icons instead of writing things like “Beasts”, “Devils”, etc. It makes the cards cleaner and faster to read visually… but I’m worried it might make things less intuitive, especially for new players. Or someone that haven't played thousand of card games :)

I’m attaching a couple of examples to show what I mean. Would you rather:
A) clean cards with icons
B) more explicit text

Curious to hear how you approach this as players (or designers)

Hi everyone,
I’m pretty new to this space and to game design in general.

Like many people here, I’ve always loved board games (especially card games), and at some point I decided to try designing one myself.

I started working on it during COVID, just in my spare time. It wasn’t meant to be anything serious at first, just something to explore and learn from. But slowly, it started to take shape.

Since I’m a graphic designer, I spent a lot of time on the visual side early on (probably more than I should have!). At the same time, I kept refining the mechanics until I had something that actually worked. I printed my first prototype, ran a couple of playtests… and then something unexpected happened.

I stopped.

Not because the game was bad, but because I hit a wall I didn’t really know how to deal with “What do I even do with this now?”

I also felt a strong hesitation about showing it to anyone outside my small group of friends. It suddenly felt more real, and that made it even harder to share! And then life happened in a much bigger way (I had a daughter, just for example :D), so the project quietly ended up in a drawer.

I reopened that drawer this January. I had set myself a simple goal for the year:
work on something personal, something that wasn’t tied to work or clients. And I thought: why not this game, which was already halfway there?

So I went back to it, and this time I approached it differently. Less “is this good enough?” and more “what can I learn from this?”

I’ll probably share a few specific design decisions in separate posts, since I’ve already run into some interesting problems (player count being one of them).

For now, I just wanted to share how this started and then restarted.

I’ve attached a few images of the current version of the game! Curious to hear first impressions, especially from people seeing it with fresh eyes.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,
I’m pretty new to this space and to game design in general.

Like many people here, I’ve always loved board games (especially card games), and at some point I decided to try designing one myself.

I started working on it during COVID, just in my spare time. It wasn’t meant to be anything serious at first, just something to explore and learn from. But slowly, it started to take shape.

Since I’m a graphic designer, I spent a lot of time on the visual side early on (probably more than I should have!). At the same time, I kept refining the mechanics until I had something that actually worked. I printed my first prototype, ran a couple of playtests… and then something unexpected happened.

I stopped.

Not because the game was bad, but because I hit a wall I didn’t really know how to deal with “What do I even do with this now?”

I also felt a strong hesitation about showing it to anyone outside my small group of friends. It suddenly felt more real, and that made it even harder to share! And then life happened in a much bigger way (I had a daughter, just for example :D), so the project quietly ended up in a drawer.

I reopened that drawer this January. I had set myself a simple goal for the year:
work on something personal, something that wasn’t tied to work or clients. And I thought: why not this game, which was already halfway there?

So I went back to it, and this time I approached it differently. Less “is this good enough?” and more “what can I learn from this?”

I’ll probably share a few specific design decisions in separate posts, since I’ve already run into some interesting problems (player count being one of them).

For now, I just wanted to share how this started and then restarted.

I’ve attached a few images of the current version of the game! Curious to hear first impressions, especially from people seeing it with fresh eyes.

Thanks!