Boardgaming in 2020: the year of the, uh, post-minis era? We can only hope!

Games
223

Here’s how bad the graphic design is:

Summary

Here are the front of the cards with the empire symbols clearly shown. The circular icons are also shown on the above player sheet. Why couldn’t the backs of the cards have these?!!!

Now here are the card backs. Quick, try to pick out which match up to which icon above, in the middle of a game, from across the table, while being held in someone’s hand.



Hold your finger out so that it’s covering up the grass on the “green” card (which is how it’s going to look during a game when someone is holding it). Can you still tell it’s supposed to be green and not blue?

How much trouble would it have been to stick the icon on the back? The same icon they put on the front! Or at least a colored border!

The red circular icon has a black eagle. The “red” card shows a tiny gold eagle (which is half a centimeter large on the card).

Look at the horse and lion circle icons. Pale yellow on the edge with brown center, and vice versa. The lion flag shown on the “brown” card is the inverse of the color scheme on its circle icon, which makes it the same as the horse circular icon, and how are you supposed to tell that’s a horse or lion on the flag from across the table? How are you even supposed to tell if brown or yellow is the dominant color on that card?

The only visual clue on the Horse empire card is that there is a person riding a horse. How is that supposed to stand out in a fantasy warfare game??? There’s a guy prominently riding on horse on the “Elephant empire” card too. You’re supposed to pick out the small blurry elephant in the background (again, from across the table). Maybe go by the tusks shown in their circular icon? Except they’re not sticking out like the elephant; they’re crossed and look more like (musical) horns than tusks. They had ONE JOB to distinguish the card as the Elephant empire instead of the Horse, and they made a horse the most prominent animal on it…

Here’s the board. Try to spot the towers without leaning in and squinting (the dark brown towers, not the little tan huts)

You probably spotted the one in the central desert and the top snow, right? How about the one in the 6 o’clock position bordering the desert? Or the 3 o’clock canyons? Or in the center hilly red area? Those are now outlined with white paint on my board.

All of these issues were run into within minutes by the THREE separate groups I played with. How in the world was this not caught in testing? The only thing I can think of is that they just used the same small core group of testers throughout the entire process who were so familiar with it that it wasn’t an issue. Not once did they bring in fresh sets of eyes to see how it fared with new players.