To promote the Channel A Kickstarter, our graphic designer Clay Gardner has been making up anime titles for his twitter friends. Check it out and get a taste of the incredible work he’s been doing on the Title Cards!

Since enough people have been asking for it, I’ve made Channel A (and its expansions) available for purchase through The Game Crafter. This is my first foray into card game design, a silly and creative game where you assemble words into anime series titles and try to pitch them to your friends. The card backs and the box sticker feature artwork by PlayerProphet.

Channel A
Channel A: Second Season
Channel A: A-Soft

edit: Derp. Fixed the typo in “Fantasy Advnture.” Now I’ll have to go take another picture.

eyepool:

I printed a deck of cards for Ewen Cluny’s game “Channel A”, which is a sort of retheme of “Apples To Apples” where you’re coming up with new anime series to match a concept being pitched by the studio (“It has to have idol singers! Who hunt monsters!”), but the titles have to be made from words on cards in your hand.

I played it with the kids, and took photos of some of the things we came up with.

“Psychic powers! Fanservice!”

• Machine Genesis Lingerie Maid
• Super Magical Girl Noodle Masters
• Lucky Sweet Flash-tan

“Bloodsport! American cartoon remake!”

• Ninja Corps Plus
• Eternal Panic Fighting Sword
• Cosmic Kitty Hell Channel

“Cyberpunk dystopia! Racing!”

• Sketch Battler Academy
• Silent Silver Bible
• Robo Seed Revolution

“Magical girls! Feudal Japan!”

• Angelic Samurai School Tales
• Brave Magica Knight Sakura
• Shining Rain Story Memories

If you want to play, you can download the PDF I made, which is formatted to print onto Avery business-card paper, so it’s easier to punch out the cards.

I just got home to find my Channel A prototype from The Game Crafter waiting for me. I took some photos with my phone, though the quality of the photos makes me think I should invest in a digital camera at some point. Anyway.

I’m really happy with it overall, though it is definitely an intermediate step in the development process. The printing quality is quite good overall, though my lack of experience making stuff for color printing shows through a bit I think. The yellow of the vote card backs came out kind of dull for example. A few of the title cards show some artifacting (which I don’t really know what to do about), but overall they look good.

The major thing I did design-wise was to give the title cards both a plain text “index” and a fancy logo, to make it easier to see what’s in your hand and then lay it out in front of the other players. I’ll have to see how they handle in play, but at a cursory look trying to arrange some cards to take pictures of it seems to work. I also added footnotes explaining what certain cards mean, since not everyone is enough of a Japanophile or whatever to know the significance of Akihabara and Harajuku.

The Game Crafter offers a few different options for boxes, and none are quite right for a card game with 310 cards. Tuck boxes top out at 108 cards, and after that is a box that holds 248 cards or a corrugated cardboard box that holds over 700 cards. I got their basic black box (because it’s cheap) with a sticker (because I can, and it shows off PlayerProphet’s artwork). My sticker design needs some work, but the quality of printing on the sticker is excellent at least. The cards came in plastic bags, so if I wanted to keep the game in that box I could use those, but for my own purposes I was able to get a basic card box that holds 300 cards for 89 cents at a local game store.

The rules are just a laser printout on letter size paper folded into thirds, and I think I’ll have to see about making it into a tri-fold booklet.

I have one or two friends who’ve expressed interest in getting the game to take conventions, so I’m thinking of making it publicly available through TGC, though I am going to make a few small refinements first.