Written by Elizabeth.

All card designs done for the first prototype are on this spreadsheet (see the different tabs at the bottom for chaos performance cards, starter performance cards, muses and roles). This includes incomplete designs, and various ideas which aren’t fully realised just yet, as well as design notes explaining the intentions and ideas behind each card.

Each row on each of these sheets is an individual card.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1amIsosHtxhldv5owGsxIE_2NHlpw1K0lrSvk8ZAJWZg/edit?usp=sharing

Design Quota

• Nine Muses, each of which have two conditions for becoming Director.
• Five (not set in stone) starter performance cards, which will be repeated across 5 identical sets.
• Sixty (not set in stone) Chaos Deck performance cards. This number will be used for the first prototype, but may change significantly after playtesting. Cards may repeat within this number. Within these, there should be equal amounts of each suit.
• 10 roles, each of which will be referenced on a good few performance cards.

To manage these quotas, as well as to get an idea of the statistical makeup of the deck, I’ve created a tab on the above spreadsheet for tracking statistics. (This screenshot will most likely be outdated, and is shown as an example: view the up-to-date statistics in the ‘Statistics’ tab.)

Design Philosophy

Cards are this game's most important content, and will most likely be where it makes or breaks. However, they're also the most malleable part, able to change significantly between iterations. They should engage with the various systems in interesting ways, and should mesh those systems together in unexpected ways, creating new interactions and dynamics.

Cards should be quickly and easily readable and understandable: the use of strong symbolic grammar will assist with this. Cards should be designed with this grammar in mind, made of a number of simple repeatable ideas. Where weirder ideas are used, those can be given as text.

The three performance card suits have the following mechanical themes at most basic:

• Comedy: Benefitting yourself or benefitting others in unexpected ways.
• Tragedy: Harming others or harming yourself in the future.
• Satyr: Benefitting at the expense of others, or messing with the fundamentals of the game.

Cards should be designed alongside Muses, instead of designing all of one and then all of the other. Muses should also be designed alongside playtesting: interesting moments can become objectives. The two conditions on each Muse should be able to be rotated between as player aims, depending on the gamestate. Often, the first condition should be the one that is more obvious and simple to plan to achieve, while the second should be weirder and more of a backup ‘hail mary’ strategy for desperate moments. Muses should also be inspired by intersections of their mythological domains with the game mechanics.