Message from the Designer #01 The following is taken from my original weblog entry on designing "TaleSpin: the Card Game." (June 2004) 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. And now, in 2004, the completed game is finally online and ready to go. I hope you enjoy it. - Joe Fourhman, June 2004 Message from the Designer #02 The following is taken from my weblog entry on the second wave of "TaleSpin: the Card Game." (September 2004) Part of what makes games like Magic exciting is the continuous influx of brand new cards. Right from the start, I wanted to do something like this for TaleSpin in the form of small expansion sets. Originally, I had drawn up plans for a Thembrian-themed set and a Pirate-themed set... but it seemed cruel to make players wait for Sky Pirate cards, so most of that imaginary expansion went into the current "base" set. With TaleSpin being a single deck card game, there comes a point where you can have too many cards. Especially when they're sleeved, which almost doubles each card's thickness. Shuffling can be a bitch. So I have settled (probably) on two separate expansions, approximately 20 cards each. That will bring the final deck size up to around 140, which is plenty. (Although I'm considering adding variant rules that would split the deck into two decks for a 2-player Baloo vs. Karnage game. That will require some investigation into balancing two halves of the main game deck.) The first of these expansions - aptly titled Expansion #1 - is online now, along with a revised rulebook that evens out some rough spots. Expansion #1 contains the fully-realized Artifact card type, which is now sort of a specialized Cargo card. Playing Artifacts isn't exactly elegant under the new rules, but it works well enough. There's two ways to play them: you can play them directly to a cargo hold by replacing an existing open cargo card. The idea being that the Artifact was what was inside the box. The second way is to play them as normal, facedown cargo and wait for someone to open them... thus exposing what was hidden inside. In both cases, the Artifacts apply permanent effects to whoever controls them. There are good Artifacts and there are bad Artifacts. All five of them are rather powerful. The balance between red and blue characters is now equal with the Expansion (unless you're playing with less than 4 players and have shuffled in the Passenger versions of the main 4 Player characters), so things are a bit more fair there in terms of red vs. blue. The blue "good guys" get a rough new Pilot named Joe McGee, who has a Damage, a Reward of opening 1 cargo, and uses your Player's Pilot stat as his... he could add up to one mean dogfighter. (If you know the episode Joe is from, he is a famed pilot instructor, so having him share your Pilot stat is thematically appropriate!) As promised, the Thembrians have arrived: Spigot, Dunder and one of my favorites, the Firing Squad. Loyal Dunder's stats get bigger if Spiggy is around, and the Firing Squad move any Passenger to last position, putting them under crosshairs, as it were! And there's now a Group Passenger that doesn't suck: Khan's Board of Directors. The Board lets you re-roll any die roll, and they have +2 Shipping. These guys hit the table quite a bit. So that's a taste of the new cards, but what did I have to change in the game's overall rules? Well, I believe they call these "patch rules" in the biz, and that's usually not something to be proud of. It tends to indicate something majorly wrong with the game design, and a quickie patch rule must be fashioned to shore up the leak. My big patch has to do with the number of cards in hand. All players still draw up to 5 at the start of their turn, but now they can't have more than 10 cards in hand, and all players must discard down to 7 at the end of EVERY turn. What we learned is that unchecked hand growth created unstoppable players. And since card-drawing is most often associated with the better skilled Pilots, a player with a high Pilot stat was almost impossible to stop. The 10-card hand limit severely weakens the game's big dogfighters. Yeah, it's an ugly patch... but my playtesters have incorporated it perfectly so I'm not ashamed. Of course, now I think I'm sensing a new problem: the tide has turned towards the game's big shippers... Several cards from the original set were tweaked or changed. Claws for Alarm is now playable and much cooler. Louie got a major upgrade to his die roll table, plus a cool combo effect with the otherwise chumpy Monkey Workers. My favorite revised character is the Passenger Molly. She now has an adorable effect I call the "stowaway." If you reveal her as bluff cargo, instead of being discarded she jumps to your first position and all opponents must discard a card. Of course, you'll only use this card if no one is playing Molly, but it is sooo thematic that I just love it. So check it out; you'll find the game a little more even-handed than before, and a lot of the expansion cards really kick ass. Now it's off to think about Expansion #2. - Joe Fourhman, September 2004

TaleSpin Sourcepage A great site with detailed descriptions of the characters and settings. Lots of screengrabs! http://talespinsourcepage.i8.com/ High Flight The continuing stories, as told through fan fiction and artwork. http://fly.to/highflight Pirate Island Great catchall site, with special emphasis on Don Karnage. http://www.sullivanet.com/pirateisland/ What's Next With Expansion #1 out of the way, now I'm looking at Expansion #2. Here's some of the card ideas I'm kicking around: A couple more Thembrians and Khan characters. More Artifacts. Gorilla Birds? Bells of Tintinnabula? An action card that turns off a Cargo Bonus (maybe permanently?) An action card that rewards you for having at least three characters sharing a keyword. An action card that provides a temporary shipping bonus for a player with low total shipping. Watch this site for future announcements. Search for TaleSpin stuff on eBay Spoiler: Most of the page will be the old TaleSpin Sega Genesis game and the 8-part VHS series.

TaleSpin and all related elements copyright the Walt Disney Company.
Card game design and website copyright Joe Fourhman 2004. Bookmark www.fourhman.com/talespin
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