Oversized cards!

General GTG General Discussion
1

Check out some pix of the oversized cards I made for the game. They were created by me in Photoshop using the official art that was recently posted by the SotM gang, then printed out and glued to the type of cardboard that shirt boxes are made of (we’re going to be in trouble come the holidays if we want to give anyone any shirts, because we’re all out of boxes now…). I put a little tape around the edges because I found that it was too easy to catch an edge and pull the glued-on paper off of the cardboard otherwise.

Each hero is 4x6, with a built-in spinner to keep track of hp. The hp spinners are actually sandwiched between the fronts and backs of the cards. A brad-style fastener allows the spinner to spin between the two so that it doesn’t obscure the front or back of the card (just the head of the brad is visible on the back).

The oversized villain cards are 6x8, with the villain’s pic and rules side-by-side on each side of the card so that you only have to flip a single card when flipping time comes. I tried many different options for the villain hp spinner, most of which didn’t work out, but the one that did work was the one pictured - a separate single spinner used for all villains that incorporates two spinners, one for the tens and one for the ones. That way I didn’t need a single, gigantic spinner with 100 digits on it.

Also not pictured are the environments. I printed out 7x8 pix for each one and glued them to cardboard, with an outline on the pic showing where the deck and discards should go. The environments don’t do anything (no flipping or anything), but they let me put out a sweet picture of an attacking dinosaur, or a futuristic cityscape, etc. alongside the rest of the cards we’re playing with. It’s all about the atmospherics. :slight_smile:

I’m glad I did it this way to start with (printing, cutting out, gluing down) because I had to go through some iterations to get things the way I wanted them, especially with the villain cards. But for the future, I’ll likely just take my files to FedEx Kinkos and have them print them out for me on double-sided glossy cardstock. I checked it out, and it’s good-quality, it’s just expensive at about $2.50 per double-sided sheet. I don’t mind paying a little for my geek-out, but paying more than the game costs for some oversized cards was too much even for me.

2

Wow, these are awsome! Can I come to your house and play?

3

Way sweet!

4

So cool! I want to see the others! Well done, sir!

5

Those look nice! Good job!

6

Very well done, though I must say, I shouldn’t be surprised. Spiff, I just figured out who you are! Mostly because you posted on one of the YouTube videos. Not to derail this thread [goes on to briefly derail thread] but I’ve been a huge fan of your videos for years! As I used to play WoW, and am a Jonathan Coulton and Paul & Storm fan, I easily ran across them . . . and was very impressed! Anyway, just wanted to say, I’m a fan. I have imagine you go to JoCo shows when possible - any chance you’re going on the JoCoCruise next year?

[re-rails thread]

Ahem, sorry about all that. So! Time for some Greater Than Games history! In the original concept for the game (and in all playtesting sets of the game) the villain cards were in fact oversized cards! All villain cards were 6"x8" and had all information laid out on them in a portrait alignment, as opposed to the landscape. We liked the idea that the villain cards were so big because they were the focus of each battle, and a big enough threat to hold the attention of all heroes at the table. However, oversized cards were one of the two things we had to compromise on when it came time to print, sadly. The cost of 4 unique oversized cards per game pushed the printing price up significantly, to the point that we would be charging over $50 for the game to see any profit, and it was more important to us for Sentinels of the Multiverse to be affordable. After some reformatting, I am not unhappy with the way splitting the villain card into 2 cards went, but it’s really awesome to see someone making oversized cards! And the HP spinners are great! Very fine work, all around.

Thanks for sharing!

7

[re-derailing thread]

That’s awesome. Glad you enjoy my videos so much (we’re talking about these: http://www.youtube.com/user/spiffworld). It’s true, one of my favorite things to do is to take something awesome that someone’s created, like superhero card games and JoCo/Paul & Storm songs, and add my own little bits to it. Buying your game was as much a fun arts and crafts project for me as it was just a cool new game acquisition.

I go to JoCo shows when he’s in the S. F. Bay Area (usually January each year, so should be coming up soon), but not the cruise.

[/re-derailment]

I’ll post a couple more pics to show some of the other heroes and environments when I get a chance. Three of the heroes (Tachyon, Ra, and Bunker) use superhero art I grabbed off the Internet rather than the official SotM pix. That’s because I started working on my cards before you guys released all the card art (which was really great, thanks). I now have the official pix for those three heroes, but by now I’m so tired of printing, cutting, and pasting that my enthusiasm for re-doing them is a bit low. :slight_smile:

However, oversized cards were one of the two things we had to compromise on when it came time to print, sadly.

What was the other thing you had to compromise on? Probably including life counters?

8

Box size. Which directly led to no HP counters. The lack of HP counters was a result of a smaller than we’d originally hoped for box.

9

First, I’ll chime in with the obligatory holy *&%$#@ those are awesome and move on from there… :smiley:

Hmm… ??? I appear to have missed something. Anyone able to point me in the direction of said official art? Might have to make some of these, myself… :wink:

Rabit

10

This thread contained a request for the official art: http://greaterthangames.info/forum/index.php/topic,128.0.html in which Adam offered to get the artwork to whoever emailed him. That’s how I got the link to where they’re posted. I assumed he’d also post a link to them somewhere on the forums here, but I guess I’ll leave that up to him.

11

http://greaterthangames.info/heroes/  http://greaterthangames.info/villains/

12

Those links are good for the art on the front of the cards but don’t include the backs of the cards.

13

You can contact me at adam@sentinelsofthemultiverse.com, I’ll send you the art for those purposes. I didn’t post the link because it was a yousendit link that expires.

14

Wow, those are cool and I want some.

15

Here are pix of the rest of my oversized cards (I linked to them rather than clogging up your browser by displaying all of them directly). I didn’t take pix of all of the heroes since most are just what you’d expect, but some are more interesting.

  1. Visionary: http://www.spiffworld.com/temp_files/visionary.jpg

You can see the front and back of her card. For all the hero cards, rather than use the backs that are on them now, I decided to just use a grayed-out version of the front pic, since I like the front pics so much. Also, you can see that the back sides of the hp spinners are all skulls.

  1. non-official art:

Since I started working on these before I had access to the official card art, four of them feature non-official hero pix that I found on the Internet. If I ever have to go back and remake any of these four cards, I’ll probably change it to use the official art (although the art on these four cards is pretty sweet…)

  1. Baron Blade

Baron Blade was the first villain I made, and I thought they’d all be this easy. As you can see, he’s got a built-in spinner like the heroes do. This seemed like a great solution, and I’d planned on using it for all the villains. However, I ran into problems with a built-in villain spinner that I’ll mention in a second. It works well for the Baron though, since his hp totals on each side of his card are completely separate.

  1. Voss: http://www.spiffworld.com/temp_files/voss.jpg

If you look closely, you can see Voss has two white triangles on his card to point to his current hp, one at the top and one at the bottom, as well as two holes where I’d planned on sticking the brads to attach the spinners. You see, since Voss has so much more hp than Baron Blade, I was forced to make either a single gigantic spinner (which didn’t work) or use two spinners (one for 90-45 hp and another for 44-0 hp, which also didn’t work). The double spinner idea was a bust because the spinners overlapped each other by too much and I couldn’t attach both in the same space, so I gave up. But my Voss card still bears the scars of the experiment.

The experiment with a single gigantic spinner almost worked until I realized the other problem with using a single giant spinner for the villains – when the villain is on its front side and you spin it to the right for X amount of damage, when you flip the card, the spinner on that side will have been spun X amount of damage to the left. That meant, to make it work, I’d have to make the numbers on the back side of the spinner increase in the opposite direction as those on the front, as well as needing to glue them down in the exact right position so that the front and back numbers weren’t out of alignment. That sounded like a giant pain in the butt, so I dropped that experiment and now use the separate villain health counter for all villains.

One other thing about Voss, you can see Tempest’s face on his card in the place of his nemesis icon. I figured that since I had so much room on the oversized cards, I’d put the nemesis’ actual face there instead of just their icon. I hadn’t figured this out until after I’d made Baron Blade’s card though, which is why he doesn’t have Legacy’s face on his card (future printings of his card definitely will).

  1. Omnitron: http://www.spiffworld.com/temp_files/omnitron.jpg

Remember what I just said about the nemesis’ faces being right there on the villain cards? Well that only works when you know who the villain’s nemesis is and you have their pic. Since we don’t know who Omnitron’s or Citizen Dawn’s nemeses are, I had to put a “?” there for now. You can be sure I’ll be reprinting them when we find out who’s face should go there.

Here’s a close-up of Omnitron’s rules text: http://www.spiffworld.com/temp_files/new_icons.jpg

It shows that I incorporated icons to represent the “at the start of the villain turn” and “at the end of the villain turn” text, like we discussed in another topic on the forums here. I like how the icons draw your eye and help with the wall of text on the cards. I’m going to see how it plays, and if I like it, will probably put it on the other villains as well.

  1. Environments

These cards don’t have any game function and don’t flip. They just provide a mat for the Environment deck and discards to go while showing off a cool pic of that environment for my visual gaming pleasure.

16

On the Spinners for Larger HP Villiand Why not use two smaller Spinners and Have a Small rectangular hole cut in the card where the two edges of the circles meet up and the numbers from both spinners combine to make the total HP.

For 16
The Left Spinner would be on 1 and the Right Spinner would be on 6.

Picture of Spinwheel attached

Hedge

HPspinwheel.jpg

17

Totally awesome, Spiff. I am not worthy.

18

Sooo… You know the holiday’s are coming up and um I think it would be great if um you guys could get me a set of these…
I am willing to part with a kidney… Thanks!

19

Spiff. These are great. Thanks for sharing. I’m might take a stab at doing this myself … that is unless the >G guys decide to sell some official ones.