Legenda-cards

TL;DR

This is a passion project of mine. I'm a big fan of multiple physical and digital card games, like Gwent from CD Projects Red.
When I play tabletop games similar to Gwent, I usually find myself overwhelmed with the complexity and the moving parts and components of complex game mechanics. I wanted to create an artistic, easy-to-play card game for everyone to enjoy.
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LEGENDA is an easy-to-learn card game, where you take the role of one of the ancient gods leading your army to win by assembling the largest army and destroying your opponent's chances of assembling theirs by using abilities and attacks. And, if you are lucky, other ancient gods will lend you a hand in your battle.

My role

I was the game creator and art director

What I did

Branding and theming
Game design
Playtests
Print

Legenda Logo

The Legenda logo contains two elements
1- Dragon skull mask (resembles role-playing and mythologies)
2- Three cards (to indicate that it is a game)

The challenge:
I wanted to make sure that Legenda had the right associations with people.

Association survey results

I created a survey where I showed the logo without any text and asked people to select ten keywords. I wanted to know how people perceive the Legenda logo.
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Ina previous version of the logo, I had a lightning bolt on one of the cards, which made users associate it with danger and electricity.

Game theme

Each set has the correlated color and pattern based on historical artifacts and engravings on the temple walls.

Game cards have enough white space to ensure that the text is readable, which creates harmony between accessibility and art.

In all of my play tests, I observed that having separate color themes for sets helped players collect their cards and store them in the box without mistakenly picking up another player’s card.

Norse set

Pattern

Patterns on the Norse set came from the Nordic symbols engraved on ancient runestones.

Colors

Norse set colors were inspired by night and
snow (black and white).

Army and characters

Army leaders are ancient Nordic Gods (Loki, Thor, Oden, etc.). Leaders were crucial elements in designing army troops because they are linked directly to the god’s story (for example, Ullr son of Thor is a hunter and archer, so archers became an essential part of the Norse army).

Diverge from Marvel

Marvel has its own take on Norse mythology that looks unique, while my take was bring it closer to the original mythology.

Egyptian set

Pattern

Patterns on the Egyptian set came from the hieroglyphics symbols engraved on the ancient temples.

Colors

The colors of the Egyptian set were inspired by desert sand and gold based on Egypt’s geographic location and ancient artifacts.

Army and characters

Army leaders are ancient Egyptian Gods (Horus, Ammit, Sekhmet, etc.). Leaders were a crucial element in deciding on army troops because they are linked directly to the god’s story (for example, Anubis is the god of mummification, so mummies are part of the army).

Animal heads

The game provides a unique take on ancient Egyptian gods. Ancient Egyptian gods usually feature a human body and the head of an animal (such as Sekhmet, a goddess with the head of a lion). I replaced the animal heads with masks.

Game design

First, I wanted to know my potential users and prepare for recruiting for play testing sessions

Age group

48%

30 to 39

Typical player count

33%

3 to 4 players

Gender group

92%

Males

Top primary motivators

Then, I wanted to understand what motivates players in a tabletop game. I was surprised to learn that strategy was not one of the top five motivators.

Problem

I created a survey to understand what I can improve in the “war-card game” category. Through a series of question, I was able to identify the following three key findings:

Players struggle with multiple components and having to do the math in every action they take in the game.

Instructions are lengthy and it could take more than 30 mins to understand the game and memorize all components.

Most war card games are played with only two players, although some tabletop games are played with four or more players.

Ideas and prototypes

With stock photos, Illuminator, and a printer, I started working on prototyping two ideas.

First idea

Elimination based attack players will be able to attach opponents’ card to elements by strength and vulnerability.

The very first high fidelity prototype for legenda

Testing method

1:1 play-test sessions with 6 players in separate play sessions

Key findings

Finding tokens took 20 minutes.
Players leaned on opponents' cards for 1 min to know if they can attack or not
Icons were small and hard to quickly scan
Some army cards were hard to map to a specific element

...3rd and final idea

Number-based strengths and weaknesses for army cards instead of elements. I ran multiple tests to refine the idea until I reached the following:

Photo during three players testing session

Photo during four players testing session

Key findings

Numbers should be in increments of 5 to simplify the math for players when attacking more than one card.
Cards need to be inverted so they can be viewed from the top or bottom.
Strength needs to match card, eg., a giant can’t be weaker than a tiger.

To win this game

You have to build the largest army by completing
8 sets of 5 cards of the same type and stopping your opponent from completing theirs.

Game duration

For me to decide how many sets players need to complete in order to win, and to enable more than 4+ players, measuring the game duration in different setups was a key.
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