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fen
Wales
Cardiff
The Vale of Glamorgan
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I rather like Mark Chaplin's card games. I find Aliens: This Time It's War to be an enjoyable two player game with solid tactical and strategic play. Plus it's a pretty quick game to play that (acid) drips with the theme of the film.
His follow up 'film treatment' game The Thing and it's expansion The Things is another great game, but seeing how it won 'best print and play 2011' here on BGG I guess that's not really news to anyone.
One thing that has hampered my ability to play is gaining access to the cards. My lovely wife is a little sensitive to card design, she refuses to play Glory to Rome a lot of the time because the card art does not appeal and I had a similar problem with getting Aliens onto the table. I'm not complaining, I see her point, especially as where The Thing's cards are concerned the file upload isn't the best quality.
So I played a little with the text only version and I rather liked what I saw, especially when The Things was added in. However as a PNPer I didn't want to get the Artscow decks and as a consequence I decided to work on a redesign that would appeal as an alternative.
The first thing I went to work on were the Character cards. There are 15 characters in total, plus backs, so it's one of the shortest sections to complete. It would also be a chance for me to dust off my graphic design skills in preparation for another project while also seeing what I could manage with a few simple textures.
I had a few objectives, I wanted a cold, decaying, metallic look to the player cards and an organic, dirty look to the Thing player's cards. There's fortunately not a lot of information on Mark's designs, he's rather elegant with his cards, so I would have room to create boarders and resize the cards to Euro size (Saving a little printer ink in the long run) as it is the card size I prefer.
Here's what I've ended up with.
I'm rather pleased with these, although a lot of the credit must go to the texture, which fortunately lent itself well to the design thanks to the colour, screws and the plate line divide. I hardly had to retouch it at all and could concentrate on layout instead.
I tried a few fonts and decided in the end that Mark's choice was the best, especially now that the text is 'painted' onto the metal.
It's a pretty simple design and didn't take that long to sort out but sometimes things just work first try.
I had more difficulty when I started to work on the outpost decks...
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