So this is a little bit of a weird one. I like card games, this is fairly obvious. I also like bubble tea. This is not obvious to people who don’t know me in real life. Anyways, recently I played In Vino Morte at a party and really enjoyed it. The host had a print and play version, and being a designer I figured if I was going to have a copy of the game, I wanted to make something cute for myself! In addition to this, I also really like the game Hanabi, but hate the aesthetic. (No offense to anyone who likes it but personally I just don’t like it.) I looked around for a version with different art online but other than the playtest version (which actually looks better in my opinion) I couldn’t find anything. So again, I realized that I am a designer and can just make my own nice looking games.

I knew I couldn’t sell either of these, since the mechanics were copywrited to other game manufacturers (I did reach out to the creator of In Vino Morte to see if we could work out some royalty agreement, but they said it was too sticky with their distributor and publisher and all that), so I could basically do whatever I wanted and it didn’t matter. For In Vino Morte, I decided to call it “mystery tea party” and have the regular “good thing” card be my bubble tea of choice (a jasmine green tea with pearls). For the bad teas, I had some fun:

I even made a cute little custom box for it:

For Hanabi, I decided to call it “Hanatea” and pick a few different kinds of bubble tea to be the different suits.

Since I knew I would likely be playing the game with Magic judges, I decided that instead of bomb and fuse counters, I’d have time extensions and Warnings (ramping up to a Game Loss).

I had a great time doing these two little projects, and it's fun to bring them around to parties!