A very long time ago I connected with Jonah Kellman, who was at the time designing a game called "Kingmaker". We talked and while he knew the game was more of a long-term project, he said that he did eventually want a designer for it. We worked together at Magic tournaments for the next few years, and eventually he got me to redesign Broker. I later solicited him for help on the rules for Tetra Master. Then when the pandemic kicked off, we ran a kickstarter for his other game, Lucent. Finally in 2022 when I had moved all the other large projects off my plate I reapproached him about the design job. Having already worked together a few times, we knew the project would go smoothly.

the first thing we needed to nail down was the layout of the cards. Unlike Lucent and 'Tis Mutiny, Jonah wanted a style that didn't rely so heavily on sharp linework. Being avid gamers ourselves, we discussed a few other games and settled on a look inpsired by Dominion.

Kingmaker is a deckbuilding game, and the game starts with three decks that all need to have the same cardback, but need to be easily sortable at the end of the game. Each deck got a different colored border to help with this, while it would've been nice to color-code the border to the faction that the cad was affiliated with, we decided that ease of game setup and teardown was more important.

I lied in the previous section, Kingmaker also features a fourth deck, a quest deck, however these cards don't get shuffled into the players deck, and we don't want them to get shuffled in, so not only do they have a different cardback, but they also have a totally different layout too!

in the game there are four main resources, wealth, power, knowledge and favor. I color coded these so that cards that either produce or require these resources are easily identifiable while in the hand. I had to make sure the colors weren't the same as the sorting colors for the deck types, otherwise that might cause confusion. Also for each resource, I made two icons, a larger, more artistic one to be displayed on the banner of each card to help identify it's type, and a smaller, more stylized one for use in the textboxes. To avoid color-blindness issues, the shapes for each banner were also correlated to the type of resource, round yellow banners for coins, pointy pennants for might and square, paper-like banners for knowledge.

However some cards were multicolored, instead of making even more unique and confusing shapes, we decided on a pointy banner, partially because that also offered the most real estate for placing icons. I also made them multicolored, again to help with easy identification in the hand. You'll also notice that the "cost" of the card is on the right hand side, which is harder to see when the hand is fanned, that's because that part of the card doesn't matter when the card is in the hand or player's deck. It only matters when the player acquires the card.

We also kept the banner theming around for the quests, however instead of artwork on these cards Jonah opted for flavor text that looked like it might be a note or memo.

I alo had to put together two cardbacks. Cardbacks are often the most complex part of any card game design. Since this game leaned heavily into medieval fantasy, without having too distinct a flavor, it was a bit of a challenge. Jonah mentioned he wanted something in a similar style to the Flesh and Blood cardbacks, but with the game's name and branding on the back. I combined both the previously seen texture used in the card frames along with imagery from each of the resources to make a unique and intricate cardback.

Because the Quest deck absolutely did not want to be shuffled in with the other cards, we also gave it a unique cardback, once again featuring the game's logo, but this time with a medieval-style map on the back.

savvy viewers might notice that all the artwork on the cards is actually from magic the gathering cards. Since Both Jonah and myself are magic judges and the majority of people playtesting the game will be magic judges I thought it would be fun to put artwork from iconic cards on the playtest versions of the game. Eventually when Jonah runs a kickstarter, he'll be commissioning a lot of artwork for the game,

Working with Jonah is always a pleasant experience. While I'm sad he didn't ask me to do the artwork for the game, I was glad to have the opportunity to do the frames! I'm excited for whenever the kickstarter launches.