Messing around with graphic design Pt. 2

Preamble/Status Update for Kickstarter

For the past couple weeks I’ve debated announcing the 1861/1867 Kickstarter launch date. Even last Wednesday I had an email queued up and ready to go out the next day announcing it for the end of September. And while I really wish what I was writing here was announcing that launch date, it isn’t ready just yet. I mean, it’s technically ready in the sense that the pieces are mostly there and look great, but there is one thing we have been wrestling with for months that doesn’t feel “complete” yet: the maps.

They are plenty playable and are some of the best-looking 18xx maps out there. The folks who have seen them have had a “WOAH” reaction which tells me it’s going in the right direction. But I can’t help but feel that they are still missing something. While most art will not be final for the Kickstarter, I want to spend just a bit more time figuring out how I can make the board really pop.

And with that, Karim and I have been hard at work and I’m excited to show you some of the stuff we’ve been working on. I’m going to be writing this basically as a series focusing on a different components each time. Today, I’m going to talk a bit about…

MAWGD2: Shares/Certificates

The first thing I’ll begin to assess when looking at a component is “What is it trying to do? And how are players going to interact with it?”

What are shares certificates trying to do? Shares exist to track ownership. It will tell players what company, how much of that company, who owns it, and who is controlling it.

How are players going to interact with it? Players are often glancing around the table to get an idea of what everyone’s portfolio looks like. They are comparing the total number of shares they own versus the leader. They are looking to see if another player is holding not 1 but 2 shares for a potential company dump. They are using their shares to calculate their earnings.

In essence, most of the time players are using shares for counting. Counting total quantity of shares. Counting quantity of shares in one company. Counting how much percentage of a company a player owns. So what features need to be on the shares that can help make them easy to count?

There are a number of things that can be on a certificate: name, color, logo, number of shares, percentage of company, mark of presidency, and marks for counting. With the exception of the mark of presidency, I view these features as trying to convey two things: visual distinction from shares of other companies and visual distinction from shares of the same company.

Visual distinction from shares of other companies:

At a glance, a share should very clearly belong to a specific company. Things like the company logo and the company name are helpful at doing this, but I find that the biggest factor in visual differentiation between companies is color. If you’re looking at a tiny card from across the table, it actually becomes quite challenging to distinguish features on the card. To your eyes, it just sort of turns into a blob.

Let’s look at a quick example comparing the Mayfair and Avalon Hill versions of 1830. For this, try to blur your eyes a little bit to simulate sitting across the table from these shares and look at the below images.

Before blurring your eyes, the shares on the left actually look pretty good while the shares on the right seem a bit bland. Once you blur your eyes though, some big issues with the shares on the left emerge.

For one, all the shares on the left have at least 2 colors, meaning they are more likely to share colors across companies. We see this with the C&O, B&M, and Erie, all sharing yellow. When my eyes are blurred, I can barely tell the B&M and C&O apart. It’s a yellow card with a dark band on the side. There are also 4 companies with the color red on the left side (PRR, NYC, NNH, and CPR). This doesn’t seem like as bad of an issue because there is a more dominant color on the card, but what happens if you start stacking the cards on top of each other? Try blurring your eyes and comparing these 2 stacks of NNH and CPR shares.

There is a differentiating color, but these two shares have a lot of things that are working against their ability to be visually distinct.

This isn’t to say you can’t have shares that have multiple colors or that shares should look completely utilitarian, but that when features all blur together, the most prevalent thing your eye will catch is color. Designing a share around that is important.

Visual distinction from shares of the same company:

At a glance, it should be clear how many shares of a specific company are in front of a player. There are several schools of thought for counting. Some believe a giant number is best to count, some think lines are best to count, and some think objects are best to count.

So I’m not just picking on Mayfair’s 1830, let’s pick on both Mayfair and Avalon HIll’s 1830! What is your gut reaction to how many shares of NYC this player has in this picture of Mayfair’s 1830?

How many shares of B&O are in this image of Avalon Hill’s 1830?

At a glance, I see 5 shares in both pictures. Only upon further inspection can you find the tiny “20%” in Mayfair’s edition. Based on the way the shares are splayed in the Avalon Hill version, you have no way of knowing one of those is a President’s share! The biggest indication that these players had a President’s share was probably the charter in their tableau. Labels like “1 Share” or “10%” as shown in the Mayfair edition are helpful for the player who owns the share, but is challenging for other players to see. I have found through testing that the easiest thing to count from afar are objects.

As I see it, your eyes are naturally tuned to count objects. From afar, features get blurry and text becomes useless, but you can still tell something is there. So long as you can tell something is there, you can count it. The big issue on the shares above is that the certificates that represent multiple shares have the same number of objects as certificates that represent one share.

So what are some examples of shares that count 1 object per share of the company?

In Mayfair’s 1844, there are thin lines on the side of the cards with each line representing 10% of the company. However, I think this many lines next to each other aren’t as visually distinct and become hard to count. Perhaps that’s why this player splayed the cards out to also show the percentages.

In Karim’s redesign of 1889, President shares have a thick band while 10% shares have a thin band. The President’s band is still just one object, but is visually distinct from the 10% shares, so I’d say this counts.

In GMT’s 1846 (borrowing from Deep Thought Games’ style), the company color is represented by a thick band with company logos representing 10% of the company.

In AAG’s 1861, the company color is represented by a thinner band with company logos representing 10% of the company.

Each of these presentations does a pretty good job of creating objects that are easy to count, whether they are lines or icons.

You could probably make the argument that instead of having these small icons or lines, a share could have giant icons to make the shares easier to count. However, I think this would actually have a negative effect. An advantage of having cards that can be splayed in a space efficient manner is it allows players to group different companies in their tableau. If the icons on a card were too large, these shares may not splay as well which would take up more table space and ultimately make it harder to visually group shares from one company.

Attempting to make shares splay 4 ways:

One thing I tried to tackle early on in the graphic design process was to keep shares visually distinct during play (i.e. when players splay shares however the hell they want to). While many of the above shares work well for counting, they usually only work well when being splayed one way.

There are 4 directions you can splay cards (left-to-right, right-to-left, top-down, bottom-up). Players have different preferences. I find that I prefer to splay left-to-right because it is more space efficient than top-down and possibly because I read left-to-right.

I tried a lot of drafts to create shares that would be visually distinct between companies, visually distinct between in the same company, but also would be visually distinct and easily countable no matter how players attempted to splay their cards.

In my observation, people tended to prefer splaying left-to-right or top-down, I think that just felt more natural, so I prioritized those directions. Another thing I tried to do was make it so that cards added to the splay were placed on top of the stack, not slid beneath it. Having to slide a card underneath the stack every time you add a card to it takes time and is fiddly to manage. This is an oft-overlooked issue with the design of a lot of shares and really hurts the shares’ usability.

The results of my experiments were… cramped. While I don’t think any of these shares look particularly bad, it’s just a lot of information on a fairly small piece of paper. I think what ultimately happens here is instead of the shares splaying really well one way, they splay poorly in 4 ways. The lines, circles, numbers, and logos all crammed in too close together and were somewhat hard to tell apart. The traditional way of putting 2 logos on the left side of a share is already pretty small from across the table. The rest of these thin lines weren’t distinguished enough and just blurred together. As a result, these ideas were ultimately scrapped.

Eventually, what Karim and I ended up deciding for 1861/1867 was that the general look of shares don’t need to change all that much from the standard 18xx presentation. There is a lot of important information on a share and its primary purpose of being easy to count is most important. Even though we didn’t change a whole lot about how the shares look, I think it was an important exercise digging into what information the shares should convey and how they could best convey it.

While art is still not final, here is what the current look is for an 1861 Minor Certificate. Watch out for a later blog about why there will be Minor Certificates!