I usually have several projects burning at once, but it's pretty rare for me to actually finish one. TaleSpin: the Card game has been one such project. Thanks to plenty of recent playtesting help, I think it's ready to hit the 'net. As with my other two games (Red Dwarf: the Card game and MST3K's Mitchell: the Card game), TaleSpin will exist publicly only as a website. If you want to read the rules and print out the cards, you can go ahead and do that. Also, my game bears no support or endorsement from Disney.
TaleSpin has been in the works for over two years. I can't imagine this is interesting to you, but here's the process thus far. Circa mid-2001 I began mulling over the broad concepts of the game: I wanted to do it in card game format, and somehow incorporate dogfighting and shipping cargo from location to location. I also wanted to include the cartoon's wide cast of characters and enable players to recreate the show as part of the game. Perhaps most importantly, I wanted it to feel like a collectible card game without being collectible. IE, a single game deck from which all players draw... but with card interactions and abilities closer to Magic than to Uno.
The first set of cards was literally Sharpie scribblings over regular playing cards. I always keep extra packs of cards around for just this purpose. Once I felt semi-comfortable with the rules, I starting the design process.
I don't know how pro game shops do it, but for me, graphic design is a huge component. First of all, using Photoshop is fun... but as far as game design goes, I can understand things a whole lot better if they look "finished." I completed the first set of black-and-white playtest cards right before our November 2001 trip to Disney World. In fact, the first place I played a game with these cards was the Disney Coronado Springs hotel.
The game stayed in this format for a year and a half. My rules were overly complex and the entire game was unwieldy and draining. Rhonda stuck it out, but even I had to admit that it just wasn't fun. In an effort to simulate airplane flight, I had developed a timing keyword system similar to the phases of the Lord of the Rings TCG. I had the Hire Phase, the Takeoff Phase, the Inflight Phase, etc etc. Looking back, it seems weird that I tried this route, since that's exactly why I don't like the LOTR TCG. Too much micromanagement, not enough action.
Two concepts that have more or less survived to present are dogfighting and shipping cargo. Dogfighting is handled very much like 7th Sea, in that each card has a numerical dogfight value on it and players must beat the previous value played. When you find yourself in a dogfight, you have to weigh a card's dogfight value against it's potential for normal play later on. Playing cargo is a bluffing game using Cargo cards. Cargo is played to the table facedown, so any card could conceivably become "cargo," but if a facedown card is flipped over and is shown to not be "real" Cargo, it is discarded. Playing cargo is how you win the game.
A big drag during this phase of creation was that I intended every character card in the game to be a discreet entity. The gameboard consisted of 12 Location cards (and still does), and I had made over 40 wooden tokens to represent each character. At the beginning of your turn, you had to choose which of your characters would be moved that turn. The idea was that multiple characters would better simulate the cartoon universe, but it ended up a complete chore. Players would avoid playing new characters just so they wouldn't have to worry about moving them. This concept evolved into a Passenger system, where your "lead" character could pick up other tokens and carry them around, adding their abilities to his own. Yes, this was a step up, but still clumsy.
It was a pile of complicated crap. TaleSpin sat on a shelf for many months until I gathered up the nerve to rework the bulk of my rulebook.
The change that served as the catalyst for awakening the project was a drastic change to my Passenger system. The most obvious gameplay recommendation was to get rid of all the extra characters. On your turn, you move your Player and that's it. That's fine for Baloo's exposure, but what about Trader Moe, Ace London, or Rebecca Cunningham? I evolved the Passenger system further: Now you play additional characters immediately as Passengers, right behind your Player card. Since some characters were originally intended as strong dogfighters, I split them off into a second card type as Pilots.
The next step with the Passengers was adding a die roll. My problem was this: the characters all needed reasons to play them. In Pokemon, you build your deck based on how well the Pokemon powers, attacks, abilities and stats all mesh. In this game, there is no deck-building... so I needed a way for characters to be powerful (thus worth playing) yet balanced (so they don't provide an instant win for whoever gets to them first.) My solution was to rewrite each character's ability - which initially was triggered by those insane timing keywords - into a list numbered 1 to 6. At the end of your turn, you roll a die and work your way down your line of characters, following the instruction according to the number you rolled. Roll a 3 and carry out all your #3 abilities in order. So sometimes Becky will let you draw 2 extra cards and sometimes she won't. I varied the effects so that, say, a 6 won't always be crappy... so if you have a good assortment of Passengers you should be seeing some kind of beneficial effect each turn.
Once this was settled, I re-Photoshopped the character cards, printed them in full color and started a new round of playtesting. Since the die roll thing is a pretty important cornerstone to the game's design, many of the other cards now were outmoded, irrelevant or totally broken! Eventually I worked through every card in the set (about 80, as it ended up) so that each card was mostly okay and understandable. Mike and Rhonda, my playtesters, provided lots of thought and time from this phase onward. With their help, we attacked other bugs and problems that needed fixing.
My next step is to redo the website, get all the card images and rules online so TaleSpin fans can check it out. Actually, I guess that's pretty much the last step, aside from future rule and card changes. Honestly, I'm damn proud of this one. The game is now fast and fun, and still does a great job of staying true to the source material. There's a great deal more graphic work on TaleSpin than on Mitchell or Red Dwarf, so the cards are more interesting and pretty to look at.
I can't say when I'll get the site up - the end of the year is a weirdly busy time at work, plus Rhon and I have our annual Fourhman Calendar to create and distribute to family and friends - but hopefully sometime soon.
