The Problem with Symbols

Behold my card game!

I call it GOLEM. It's a beautiful mess right now, and the numbers are all pretty much made up. Fight value of 10 for a Dick Wolf? Sure, sounds good! Watch out for Sparkle Vampires, they'll decrease your max health by 1 if they beat you. Plus they're scary... and not quite like the other teenage boys at your High School. What are you hiding, you sexy scary Sparkle Vampire?

I've had my GOLEM concept for as long as Patrick has been developing Yore. Patrick is a little more methodical and clean working than I am. All my playtest pieces are just hand-written on chopped up index cards. The 5x5 card layout you see in the picture is what an island in the game will look like. Players will generate an Island during game setup by referencing location cards (seen below) which show what your next Island will be made up of. Players then move their characters from card to card and react to the card they land on. In order to decide which cards build each island, the island cards have symbols on the back to match:

Squiggles! Spirals! Pound signs! And me red balloons! As you can see, Shadow Mountain consists largely of... umm... stars? It's a starry shadowy kind of mountain. During setup, we might very well draw Shadow Mountain as our first Island location, and that location card tells us which Island card of each symbol to draw, shuffle together, and then place on the table to create our new and unexplored GOLEM Island.

What's the difference between a spiral and a strange ziggy-zag symbol on the back of the card, you say? Well... absolutely nothing. I feel like that's a problem right now. At one point I thought it would be cool to theme each Island card to a kind of terrain with symbols to correspond. A skull symbol for a swamp Islands full of zombies! A tree symbol for forest Islands! A fireball for mount...

Oh... shit.

So it turns out coming up with unique symbols is kind of tough. Sure there are some easy and less popular alternatives, like a tiny rock or mountain symbol for mountain-themed terrain... but what kind of choices would you have for a swamp symbol? What color would you use other than black? Swamps are all about rot and mucky water and lillypads... so maybe brown? Only brown isn't exactly appealing for an icon we want to stand out from potential background art. The icons have to make sense and they've got to pop out no matter which card they're on.

I had already used up a bunch of colors, by the way, when designing the symbols in my game Item system; a key component to character advancement in GOLEM.

GOLEM uses Items like swords and magic amulets that the players can equip. They'll have five different symbols, such as a fire symbol for a torch and a magic lightning symbol for a wand. Some Items will have multiple symbols, like a fire axe having both physical and fire icons. This gives me a way to control the number of items a player can use at once that's easy to grasp and doesn't rip off Arkham Horror's two-handed system. Basically you can only equip one of each symbol. If you have a torch Item with a fire icon, you have to trade it out to use your fire axe Item, which also has fire as one of its icons.

I feel like this kind of symbol mechanic works well for weapons in combat. It's going to prevent characters from getting too powerful, while maintaining some cool flavor and player choices. I could even eventually implement monster weaknesses versus certain weapon symbols. I could eventually do craaaazy shit! Symbols attacking other symbols! Symbols getting into heated drug-fueled arguments and throwing other symbols out of their downtown studio apartment! Symbols that steal the babies of other symbols. Symbols that rape other unsuspecting symbols late at night in the middle of the park. Oh and let's not forget Potion cards which have their own little symbol on them as well. Don't mess with the Potion symbol.

If all my symbols make sense, is it still possible to have too many of them?

So then of course without solving any of my initial symbol dilemmas, the gang held a play test to see if GOLEM was even worth pursuing as a game. That resulted in some pretty good feedback and it got me brainstorming other ideas for GOLEM, like the possibility of different monster sub types and the fun I could making that a new element in the game (Types like Undead, Elemental, Spiritual, Mechanical, etc...). Soon I realized I might need even more icons to represent those monster traits. My learning curve is steadily going through the damn roof.


My options for solving this problem are as follows:

• Replace some of the symbols with something else, like colors.
• Cut down on the number of different card types that need unique symbols.
• Do both things.
• Do neither and die a lonely painful death. Cops find my corpse a week later, half eaten by my own cat, and still clutching scraps of paper with zig-zag symbols on them.