Initial Game Premise

Date is approximate. Written retrospectively.

Some thoughts on theming:

• Utilizing the five named elements
• Using the quantity “5” to reinforce theme
• All weaponry from 17th century feudal Japan
• Avoid the word “honor”; it’s hackneyed
• Game should be mostly planning
• Duel should feel “savage” (in the sense of severity, not coarseness)
• Use quotes from source text (any translation) for card names and flavor, as much as possible

The initial rules pass had:

• Four rounds of drafting, 1 round of dueling
• Players select 5 cards (one of each element) to use as their “Duel spread”, placed facedown
• Card types included “weapons”, “stances”, “techniques”, “reactions”
• Players initiate with an audible “EI!”, which I imagined would make parallel play comical / flavorful

The first playtest I ran with Wythe (from Stillfleet Studio). It felt fun, but also needed a lot of clarification and rules simplification.

The dueling phase, in particular, was an overload of information. Each card has a unique training effect and also a separate effect that occurs when the card is used during the duel. With 8-10 cards out per round, that all required reading, and no illustrations, this was a lot of text to consider. None of this was really surprising, as it’s the first pass.

That said, we both found it to be fun, and it felt like the idea I was going for.

Prototyping

This initial prototype needed two things:

1. unique and identifiable cardbacks with simple / easily identifiable graphics
2. a layout on each card that supported three pieces of information: venue, training text, dueling text

For the cardback, I choose a color for each card type, and then found kanji vector art for each element, printed off a bunch of small slips in those colors, and used transparent card sleeves. In a later iteration, I switched to colored sleeves, which was a bit easier to perceive.

For the card front, The initial layout looked like this:

+--------------------+
|   | Training text  |
|   |                |
| V |                |
| E |                |
| N |________________|
| U |                |
| E |                |
|   |                |
|   | Dueling text   |
|   |                |
|   |                |
+--------------------+

This allowed each card to function as a venue component, to have a use during the training phase, and then a function during the duel.

Each card had a different Training text (a different quote pulled from the source material) and different Dueling text (also a different quote). I tried to keep the venue, training, and dueling text somewhat thematically similar, but I wasn’t too worried about it right now.

I wrote all of these definitions into a YML file, ran it through my exporter script, and it dumped out a CSV file. I uploaded the CSV file to Dextrous, made a card layout in it, then exported a PDF. Then I printed the PDF, cut the cards out, sleeved them up, and was ready to start playtesting.

It sounds like a lot of steps, but the exporting to CSV -> downloading the PDF took maybe 5 minutes. The longest part was writing out the YML file.