Saturday, July 01, 2006

The CE Project: Special Destinies and Comets

On to the "second half" of the Destiny deck: Specials and Comets!

Layout-wise, the Special Destinies aren't all that interesting. The cones are the same as the White cone I'd made up earlier for normal Destinies, with text centered and wrapped inside the cone part. Simple enough to throw together.

One thing I might do is make a duplicate or near-duplicate set of Reverse Cone Special Destinies to use with the normal ones. (I say near-duplicate because I'd probably want to alter the Reverse Cone Warp Challenge. In that vein, what if you reversed all of the Specials? The least cards, base with the least number of tokens, anyone except the player on your left, etc. Might be interesting to try.)

I knew my feeble drawing skills would not make a good comet picture, so I decided to seek out a good picture of a comet to use as the background from the Internet. There are some awesome picture galleries out there thanks to various government agencies, schools of higher learning, and many people who stargaze as a hobby. I spent hours looking through stellar photography. (Seeing the vast array of stars at night is one thing I miss, having moved to the Twin Cities years ago.)

For the Comets I chose a picture of Comet Hyakutake from the UCCS Observatory Webpage. Thanks to the photographer, Steve Dillinger, for providing a great picture!

The scaled down comet picture doesn't quite fill up the available space the way I put the Comets together, leaving black edges with no stars in the box. If I redo them at some point I'll go back and scale the picture up a bit to fix that. I'd also add a thin black outline around "Comet" to keep the text separated from the background. (Desktop Publishing tip: Most outlines are drawn down the center of the edge of your shape; this called being center framed or center stroked. To outline something without the outline drawing partly over the original object, make a duplicate of the object in place and give the one in the back twice the outline thickness that you want. Group them together and you're ready to go!)

Enough talk! Here's some samples:

Most Cards (Special Destiny) Restrained Attack (Comet) Power Rewop (Comet)

(I couldn't resist playing with the Power Rewop. Maybe it should have been Power rewoP? :)

Next time: Boring Challenge Cards -or- How Many Ways Can You Spell Compromise?