A wise man* once said, “If your prototype looks good, you’re doing it wrong!” The implication here is that any time spent on prototype appearance is wasted, and would be better spent on functionality.
I mostly agree with this idea, but would add the corollary, “But if it takes like ten minutes to make your prototype look 200 percent better, go for it.”
That’s what I was thinking as I applied the tips and tutorials from earlier this week and prototyped the cards for Doomed Colony. No, I didn’t need graphical backgrounds on the cards. And I definitely didn’t have time to do unique images for each card. But I could spend ten minutes making sure the end results didn’t cause eyeball bleeding.
You can see those end results in this PDF. It includes one copy of each card. In the deck, there are about four copies of each card, with the exception of the Countdown cards, of which there are ten.
So are the cards fun to play? Is the ratio of cards in the deck correct? Did I waste my time on graphics when I should have spent those ten minutes improving game play?
We won’t know until I actually physically playtest the prototype. And to do that, I still need counters and boards… which we’ll talk about on Friday.
* Okay, it was me.
