Marseille Sophistiqué - Tarot Kickstarting, week 1 (part 5)

So, Kickstarter has come to town. As of writing this, my wife's and my kickstarter is about $50 from funded, as we pass the first week mark (I believe it was around 1:00 PM, last Monday, when we launched).

Marseille Sophistiqué is an updated version of the French Tarot (or Tarocchi) deck, which was created in Europe in the 15th century and used for card games well before it was adopted (and adapted) for fortune telling/divination.

For a little detail on how French Tarot is played, it's a point-trick taking game, that can be played in variants of 3-6 players (4 is standard, and the larger family of games can accommodate 2-8 players), that revolves around the idea of intentionally unbalanced hands: The cards are only very lightly randomized, with the goal that one player will have a strong enough hand to take on a team of all of the other players, combined.

Marseille Sophistiqué - Tarot Illustration (part 4)

So, things are getting pretty close to set, with this deck. The image above is a variant on our box art- we're going with a horizontal format- and features a preview of our Trumps/Major Arcana.

Marseille Sophistiqué - Tarot Illustration (part 3)

...And then there were four.

In the Cards - Tarot Illustration (part 2)

I've done quite a few more cards, and fine-tuned the ones I've completed further.

In the Cards - Tarot Illustration (part 1)

So, this is a pretty big shift from most of what I've been doing.

Flying Solo - Sedition Wars Solo Play Designer's Notes & (unofficial) Co-op Rules

The Solo rules variant for Sedition Wars is the most ambitious and complex set of rules I've written. While I started the project expecting I could get it done in around 6-8 pages, it became something far grander in scope as I worked on it.

(This article assumes you're either familiar with the terms, have the rules (the beta rules PDFs are here) or are fine catching as catch can, knowing some game terms aren't explained.)

Initial Concept

Coming into the project, I had a ton of experience testing Sedition Wars, and knew the flow of the game pretty much backwards and forwards. There were a few points I knew I wanted to address from the beginning:

Cocci, A Sedition Wars scenario

This scenario is actually the first I've written that went beyond "wouldn't it be cool if...?" and is actually developed and tested.