So this game was an utter surprise. I was initially just looking for a very quick and simple cartoony projekt, and something that had been in the back of my mind for ages ever since I saw it as a kid was the game Quaddle from the I guess now rather unknown cartoon Sitting Ducks (swedish dub), and I thought it would be kind of cool to try to realise that into a real game. So this project instead morphed into a roman republic inspired game and not even remotely like how I imagined that Quaddle game, so I might return to that idea some day.
The basic idea behind QVAK would be that the players take the roles of corrupt and power hungry senators in this roman analogue, all striving for more power and eventually enough support to declare themselves emperors. This mechanic would be realized through a system where all players begin the game with the same numbers of votes behind them and then trough performing different actions during the game gain more votes from the other players or trough other channels, and when a player have more than 50% of the votes the may declare themselves emperor and win the game. If none of the players manage to gain more than 50% of the votes by the games end they all lose and democracy is maintained.
Once I knew/thought I wanted to make the Quaddle game I began by looking for what art style to go with. Since I’ve mostly done Hanna Barbera influenced stuff I instead wanted to create something more in a Disney vain. Unfortunately I don’t know the name of the artist but my main influence was the 5Y short stories from the back of PK (The Duck Avenger, basically Donald Ducks superhero alter ego). Always loved the style of those shorts, and would’ve loved trying out that water color style, but it didn’t really pan out with the sort of marble statue feel that I went with for the illustrations.
I was also hugely inspired by Heiko Günther absolutely gobsmackingly beautiful redesign of “Glory to Rome”. That is a 100% where to roman angle came in; began drawing roman looking ducks and then I was stuck.
I began the actual design of the game by simulationsly trying to define the direction for the artwork and for the graphic design. Once I had an illustration I felt confident with and some direction for the graphic design I moved over from PS to Illustrator where I began drafting a more finalized design. Once I felt satisfied with the leader card (will probably never create non-character driven game) the other components came with very little struggle. Partly because I had defined the graphic design with the leader card but also since I trough all the different iterations had made a bunch of unused graphic assets that could be reused for the other cards.
Sometimes feel that I went with a little too simple of design, considering how much time I spent trying to come up with other interesting ways to convey the information, in the end it’s probably just a sunken cost fallacy on my part.
This porcess is not very different from how I usually approach these types of illustrations, but here is a quick breakdown of my process for the statues/portraits.
1. Begin with a pretty tight sketch, but not to tight as I want to leave some room for interpretation in the inking sketch. On this projekt I actually sketched out all portraits at the same time.
2. Inked the sketch using a somewhat rough brush
3. Blocked in the painting with two values, simple light and dark separation. I accidentally painted on the wrong layer so the beak is a little rendered on this particular portait.
4. Went over the whole paining and rendered it, then added a gradation map (?) to get that brownish texture to better match the feel of the card.
Here are all the leaders together. I think I achieved some nice variation in characters both purely based on shapes but also the different personalities. Though I did have some sort of Asterix and Obelix feeling throughout doing all the portraits, must be the cartoony roman feel.
The goods cards. Not much to say except I somehow found these super enjoyable to design and illustrate. The format for these would be the width of a mini card in a square, so 4,5x4,5 cm? I was initally thinking that certain goods would only be available at certain places, but in the end decided that it would make it a needlessly complicated system, as nothing else in the game was geographically bound.
The tokens for the different actions. The players would interact in a sort of reversed Caverna worker placement way, instead of placing you worker on an action space, you take the action space and place on your worker/leader card. Not really thank inventive but it allows more connection with the leaders you have. The actions would be the following: Market, Political/Senate, Temple/forum, Trading and Warfare.
A little photoshop mock up of what the componentes would look like in action. This is basically what each player would have in front of them. A action token over a leader to indicate that that action and leader have been spent for that round, your remanining unspeant leader and all the unsold goods you have.
Front and back for the last two card types of the game.
The policy cards have, if enacted, different game changing effects, in this case it gives a player exclusive right to a trade action token. I imagine that the policy cards work in the following manner; If a player take an policy action they may draft two policy cards, keep one and discard the other. These policies may then be played during the policy enactment phase, and among all the policy cards played the one which gain the most votes is enacted. This would create room for some negotiation among players to gain votes from other one another, or what policies to enact or whatever. The twist would be that each round/year/month one policy must be enacted, so if only one player have played a policy card then that policy is enacted.
The military card would be a lot more straightforward; a player take the military action which allows them to draw a military card. On this card their leader is placed in a situation with two different routes of action, giving them different resources or advantages. In this case the player faces a surrendering general which they may either add as one of the leaders or kill to gain gold. I like this mechanic as it adds a bit of role playing to the experience, are you playing as ruthless warlord or more of a diplomat?
First game with a whole game board! Wooo. Then perhaps my next project can be the one where I actually get to design the box and manual (although the “Mafia” game I made a box for, but there the big challenge laid within designing and crafting the actual box out of whatever cardboard I had laying around)
To the left we have a display of all policies enacted, which also work as a countdown to the games end; once the eight policy has been enacted the game is over and if no one player have gained more than half the votes then the populus wins and democracy have been secured.
The middle field is spaces for all the actions tiles. In hindsight they should also have some graphics to indicate which sort of actions should go there, as there is some thin thin thematic flavour over the placement of the action tiles, trade action being placed at important roman ports or trade routes, military actions being placed close to the edge of the empire or where they fought a lot of conflicts.
and finally to the right we have the diagram over how many votes each players has, the VP track of this game if you wish. I like how it is an easy system to gauge how many votes each player have just by the height of the column, and also easy to check how many votes players would have combined if the would cooperate over a policy or something similar. A little side note; it would be interesting if one could develop a system that really encouraged creating pacts between players, so that players could have something along the lines of Caesar's triumvirate and in the end be stabbed in the back.
A closer look at the game board with a photoshop mock-up of the policy field. Not much to say but in hindsight I would’ve liked some more contrast between the background and the card, now the blend a little to much into the rest of the board.
A mock-up of the action tiles, although i did a pretty bad photoshop job with this one, looks a bit to 3d-rendery for my taste. But I hope I conveyed the idea how they would be used on the board.
