Clerics & Codenames, v0.0.2

Back in late October, I played a game of Codenames by Vlaada Chvátil. I was impressed with how much fun it is, how challenging, how much the words stuck in my head afterward, and how simple a game it seemed.

I appreciate that when somebody is really good at their art, they can make stuff that looks simple, even if it takes a lot of work, so to say that it seems like a simple game isn't meant to diminish it - it's elegant.

I also wondered how much work it'd be to make a playable set of expansion cards. I had a bunch of questions - should you go for simple words? Just nouns? Would choosing words from a theme make sense? (Star Wars? Computers? Geek Life?) Or would that narrow the range of possible connections too much?

I poked around, looking for word lists of common words (inspired by Randall Munroe's Thing Explainer, which also inspired Space Weird Thing, which is awesome, but is only super loosely connected to the game I was talking about), but couldn't find a list I liked, so I set things aside for a bit.

Then, last week, somehow the idea of taking a bunch of words from fantasy role playing games might be a place to start. I went back to a couple of the works that made an impression on me at an early age, the Holmes edition of the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands. Skimming through there (and paying particular attention to glossaries), I came up with many words that were burned into my brain first through Dungeons & Dragons.

Those words went into a Google Docs Spreadsheet (er, a Google Spreadsheet as hosted on Google Drive?), which I then exported as a CSV file.

Using Reportlab and PIL (actually Pillow), I made a PDF, which I printed out on cardstock:

I invited a few of my coworkers to sit down and see if a strongly-themed cardset would actually be fun, and I was surprised first by how enthusiastic people were, and then I was surprised that it played really well.

Some of the feedback included:

• randomize the cards, because we had a bunch of 'h' words, followed by a bunch of 'c' words. Shuffling home-printed cardstock cards is challenging.
• wouldn't it be awesome for the red and blue 'cover' cards from the Codenames set were also themed?
• remove words that are too close in meaning. e.g. 'cave' and 'cavern', 'vial' and 'phial'.
• rework the script so that the fontsize is consistent from card to card
• I would totally buy this on DriveThruCards
• Maybe this should be posted on Board Game Geek 

So, stuff I've done today:

Script rework. I reworked my Python script to generate either letter (print and play) or mini-card (Drive Thru Cards) page sizes. Reportlab's canvas object defaults to letter, but you can pass in a pagesize argument.

I pulled the UniversalisADFStd-Regular.otf file into fontforge and exported it as a TTF. This made Reportlab happier with the file, as the outlines were in a format that it liked. (Known issue, they're in no hurry to support Postscript outlines, or something.

In my 1st printing, I had worked around the OTF limitations by using Pillow to create an image just large enough to hold the text, rendering the text to an in-memory image, then using Reportlab to insert that image into my PDF. Now that Reportlab can render the text directly, I can skip Pillow for this, which fixes the odd sizing artifacts that I was seeing - for some words (ones with descenders, I think), the images were sizing differently from others. Now, since I'm not using images, the font sizes don't have that step to cause strange behaviors.

Randomized the cards. For the first image (above), I wanted to make sure I could easily find "dungeon" and "dragon", so I sorted the words. This led to a whole bunch of the same first letter. This will be solved, in time, when I get better printed cards. Until then, I might as well shuffle the words before creating the PDF.

Custom Red & Blue cards. I've made some solid color cards, as well as some temporary placeholder themed cards using copyrighted content that I cannot distribute. Red and Blue line up nicely with that particular content, though.

Word curation. I got rid of 'cave'. I added 'sepulchre'. I should probably spell that the way any good United States citizen spells it. Oops. Also forgot to remove 'phial'.

Printed out a new playable set:

I haven't got my print settings set up right - the cards aren't lining up front-and-back the way I had intended. Not a huge thing, totally playable as-is, but if I wanted to distribute this as print-and-play, I'd want to make sure that it's possible to line up the cards.

Board Game Geek posting. I have had an account on BGG for years, mostly using it to read reviews. I found the link to create a new listing for a new game, which itself depends on a BGG page for designer and publisher, so I created new listings for myself and for Big Dice Games. It's like I'm a real boy!

All of the above are under review. I think that's a good policy. If it were faster, I'd include a link here to my listings.

DriveThruCards listing. As much to test out the process (is the PDF I generated from ReportLab the right flavor of PDF that DTC is expecting?) as anything, I made a listing of this on DriveThruCards. This required setting my account up as a publisher account (whee). It also required a cover image, which I made by cropping the above photo. Good enough for a work-in-progress.

Apparently, it passed the simple checks to get to the point where I could order a proof, so I have. I'm eager to see if it prints without errors, and if it gets to me before I'm on vacation.

Feels like a lot, and this is for a trivial little expansion to somebody else's game. But it's fun to play, and it's been fun to go through the process.