A Billion Suns Contract Cards - Designers Notes

Contract Card Layout

In the early designs for the contract cards I considered imposing a common structure to the rules text on all cards, with a defined area of the card for each part of the rules that all contracts have in common. For example, all cards would have an area for Setup rules, another for Revenue rules, and probably another for triggered effects that occur when various phases of the game are reached. It was obvious quite quickly that this would create problems because some cards have very lengthy rules of a given type and others just a few words. For example, a consistent defined area or panel on the card for Revenue would need to be big enough for the longest Revenue rules, meaning most cards would be wasting a lot of space. And, aside from Setup and Revenue, and the various triggered effects, there are actually very few commonly named rules among the contracts in the books. Bad PR is another one, but this only occurs on a small handful of cards. In fact, having any names for the rules soon got culled in the hunt for reduced word count. So from a layout perspective I arrived quite quickly at the idea of having one rules panel on the card with the actual rules structured according to the needs of each contract.

The design evolved to something that evokes a sort of slide out panel that one might see on a sci-fi graphical interface, perhaps on some sort of command console on a spaceship. Obviously the length of the rules text varies a lot from contract to contract. Along with varying the font size the panel would be “pulled out” further for cards with lots of rules text, with the slide out design of the panel design providing a thematic reason why this layout element varies from card to card.

Rewriting the Rules

Proofs showed that I should be aiming for a minimum font size of 22pt. Its certainly possible to read fonts at a smaller size than this, but anything lower starts to be a struggle and to look crowded. Combined with the need to showcase as much of the gorgeous artwork as possible, the practical implications of all this were that I needed to reduce the length of the rules by to about half on average. For example, Whaling is one of the busiest contract cards, and has over 1,400 characters in the rulebook while the contract card comes in at a relatively svelte 780 characters.

I came to see it as a personal challenge to capture the essence of the rules to such an extent that 99% of games could be run without recourse to the contracts section of the rulebook. Most of this work was nothing other than old fashioned copyediting, going through many iterations to make the rules more concise and constantly checking to ensure the original meaning of the rules wasn’t lost.

I’m not a professional copyeditor nor a rules writer, but I end up doing a lot of writing and editing in my job, and it certainly helps that the tone of voice of the company I work for emphasises direct, concise and clear writing, meaning I have years of experience cutting down and simplifying text. I’ve also played TCG’s for most of my life (Magic, Doomtown and more recently Arkham Horror) and studied closely how their rules are formatted and written, experience that undoubtedly helped here.

There are a few tricks and rules I followed to help reduce the character count:

• Rule names were dropped. For a rules reference it’s not necessary to know that the rule is called “Appraise Quarry”, only to know what the rule does.
• Removing clarifications that on balance I considered to be obvious. For example, in the rule “When a Space Kraken is scanned the controller of the scanning battlegroup draws the top card of the ♦ Contract Deck”,
• I used arrows as bullet points wherever a rule allows a player to proactively interact with the game by doing something (scanning, destroying, jumping out and so on). In effect, the arrowed bullet points became my actions, leaving anything else to be a setup rule or triggered effect (in TCG parlance, a triggered effect is anything that happens automatically when another condition is met, usually in ABS this happens based on a game phase such as the End Phase being reached). While this increases the physical space used up by the rules (because bulleted text is indented), it helps to reduce the character count of the following rule and makes the cards infinitely easier to scan and digest.
• Shortening or removing common game terminology. Hence, “draw the top card of the ♦ contract deck” becomes simply “draw the top ♦”.
• Reformatting bulleted or numbered lists into single paragraphs. This saves physical space and is very important on some contracts like Whaling where the Instinctual rule has an introductory paragraph and 4 numbered bullets in the rulebook, reduced to one paragraph on the contract card.
• After the first reference things are referred to in shorthand. For example, “space kraken” are referred to as such only once, after this they are simply “kraken”.
• I tried to keep flavour text in wherever possible, but on the longest contracts this was dropped.

The rules rewrite is absolutely the most important part of this whole process and a V1 of this was the first thing I completed, to prove to myself that it was possible to cut down the character count so drastically without losing the essence of the rules. I reckon about 80% of the final reduction was done in that V1 with all subsequent revisions serving to eke out the savings and add further clarity to the rules. I’m proud of the job I did on this and I believe I achieved my objective of the cards being able to completely replace the rulebook in 99% of games. An important stamp of approval came when Mike agreed to use my abridged rules text on his official downloadable contract cards, and helped me with the last bit of the work.

Icons & Artwork

The custom suit icons are, for want of a better word, more “spacey”. I considered using completely custom icons, but this would mean players would be required to buy custom playing cards to use my contract cards instead of being able to use a normal deck of playing cards.

Gabriel’s work is created and mainly consumed digitally. An important step in the process was to adjust the colour balance, brightness and contrast of the work so it remains faithful to the original once printed. In general the initial card proofs were a bit dim and lacked contrast so we dialled up the brightness and contrast, and sometimes the sharpness, to slightly uncomfortable levels when viewed on a computer ensuring they come out right in print.