Secret Santa PnP – Designer Diary #1: I made some cards! (via BoardGameGeek)

Note: This was originally published as a forum post at BoardGameGeek.com where you can follow the game's development process.

Today I took the first practical steps on the journey to make Secret Santa PnP reality. After crunching some math and finding a decent amount of cards (52 for 4 players, something else for 3 players), I jumped into designing some card templates (I wanted to start from something visual even though I'm no graphic designer).

After I had some idea of what my humans and gifts will look like, I jumped on my trusty notebook and started drafting ideas for gifts. I knew I wanted some categories (like monetary value, $ – $$$ and thematic categories like food) but I wasn't sure how to make a good balance. I tried a few methods (started by assigning a $ value to 24 items, each $ got 8) but finally got a nice mixture by building an Excel sheet, manually assigning base and randomizing the rest and then balancing out by hand.

So now I had 8 categories and 24 items so I got onto my game building workshop (blank A4s, sleeves and a paper cutter) and drew all the 52 cards: 32 humans/employees/Christmas enthusiasts (terminology pending) and 20 unique gifts (actually I did 24 since I messed up math but will downsize to 20) as seen below.

Each gift has a name, awesome drawing of them and 1-3 categories (out of 8 possible) that they belong to.

Each person has a name, face, Gift-Giver Personality and Gift-Receiver Personality which defines which gifts score points and which don't. Basically you want to match both personalities with the categories of the gift to maximize your score.

Above is an example of the final grid. In four player game, you draft 13 cards (4 x 3 + 1) and you're required to place your card either immediately to the play area (grid) or to a reserve spot to be used later.

After a few fully randomized (just drawing right amount of cards from the deck) playthrough, I got maximum score which was expected since I decided to start with very broad categories. Most gifts now have 3 categories which will be toned down after more playtesting.

I also started making the first rule cards (trying to fit all rules to 2 standard sized cards) and learned that it's super hard. I have played hundreds of board games and thought I'd know how to write rules having read so many of them but turns out it's harder than I expected.

Currently the scoring is based on successful connections (don't know what to call them yet). If a giver buys a gift that matches their personality, that's +1VP. If the gift matches the receivers personality, that's +1VP. A complete row is +1VP. If the grid is not complete (drafted too many/few of some type), that's -2VP. So maximum is 12VP. All of that is subject to change once I find out how well players end up scoring.

Next steps are to test, test, test and test and also start thinking about the visuals. I'll probably go with icons for categories rather than words to make it bit nicer looking but let's see where the road takes me.

All feedback is welcomed!