Explore the mysteries of Mor Nadar in this epic coop adventure with branching episodes!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Tariffs, Current Status, Upgrade Packs ,2025 Conventions, Review from Boardgameduck
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Apr 29, 2025 at 03:27:29 AM
Hi folks,
It’s been a while since the last update and a fair bit has happened since then, not all of it is positive from a game production perspective. I've tried to write this update multiple times but it has not been easy because of the current situation.
Firstly this update is not meant to be political in any way – we don’t get involved in discussing the politics of any nation (including our own). We steer clear of discussing independence referenda, Brexit, or any other political debates, including tariffs (from a political perspective). We are here to pursue creative interests and try and build a cool world together – that’s our objective pure and simple.
We do however need to look at the real world implications of some decisions sometimes and what that means for us as a publisher and you as a backer when it has an impact on us creating rewards and you receiving them.
A few helpful facts about Inspiring Games Inspiring Games is based in the UK and has been trading since 2016. We have raised over $250k on Kickstarter/BackerKit in our campaigns and have shipped more than 10k copies of Legends Untold products around the world. In terms of employees we are very much a small Indie outfit, Hugh and Kev run the business on a part time basis, both of us have families and full time jobs. We are supported on a graphic design, art design, and creative design basis by Morgan at Jovial Graphics and work with a large portfolio of artists, proofreaders and other creatives as required on a gig basis. We are also supported by a large demo team of friends who help us playtest and demo games. Finally we are incredibly appreciative of the community that we have built with you, who often reach out to us via email, BGG, and social media to share your thoughts and ideas for our games and the world of Mor Nadar.
Current Status I am delighted to confirm we have now finished all the rework on the Foe cards. There was a lot to do but we absolutely thing the effort was worth it. We now have Foe cards that are easier to read, quicker to set up/file, show off more of the art, and will (depending on the card in question) have better/different rules and lore.
Please see examples below:
EXAMPLE 1 - Thuban Asharat from the Weeping Caves Extended Edition
I have shared the new Foe layout before but thought some of you may appreciate a brief reminder here.
Starting at the top left of the card note the movement of the Ranged icon and the Alertness icon up to the top beside the Foe icon. This has been done because you need these right at the start of Combat when making the Surprise test and setting up the Battlefield. The space it has vacated has now been filled with the Creature Health value (in this case 3) as that is the next thing you need when setting up tokens.
We now move down to the Creature # and Breakpoint Value per number of Heroes table which has been transferred to the vertical format I shared before freeing up a larger amount of space for the text box.
Continuing down please note the colour coded Melee (pink) and Ranged (Steel) elements so it is really clear which value to use in attacks and for damage.
You can now see a much simpler art area without the old style Foe#/breakpoint cartouches overlaid - this lets us share more of the details from the artist that at times were struggling with before. For example with Thuban you can now see more of the 'pied piper' motif than before, it is about the pipes AND the rats. With this in mind we have tweaked the rules on this card to introduce a new card specific rule 'Rat Swarm' which we think is really fun (well in a doomed adventurer type way). The rats are smart enough to pick on the weakest prey in the team first - another interesting challenge you will not have seen before.
We have dropped the Summoner rule here also as it was the only Summoner/Minion card in the entire Caves set which causes a one off confusion learning the rules and makes punchboard tokens more of a faff too. We have therefore moved the Summoners to Deepsorrow and have finalised Thuban as the ratmaster he really is.
Please note the increase in font size of the rules, and the addition of lore to the card which we are able to do with the new format.
Finally please note the significantly increased font size of the card code which makes it far easier to find the cards during setup/teardown.
EXAMPLE 2 - Bile Beast from the Great Sewers Extended Edition
The main points I want to bring out on this card are that with the revised format we can fit in that extra text and in the increased font size. For the Bile Beast you can now see we have added in some lore text and reinserted the Legendary rule that we could not fit in on the old version (as denoted by the proofing mark).
Note the Keywords at the top and that Card Code - far easier to read.
Morgan has also realigned some of the art where we think you can get an improved view of the Foes you can fight. As I write this I am smiling a wee bit, the Bile Beast is one of my favourite pieces out of the thousands of art assets we own for LU, it is so iconic on the Sewers set box.
EXAMPLE 3 - Smouldering Bloom from the Illumination of Deepsorrow
The Smouldering Bloom from Deepsorrow perhaps shows the improvement in the text box the best. The Rules are just easier to read and we have just managed to squeeze in a line of lore in the bigger space.
Please note the shift in Card Code and Environment for this card as it was updated.
Next Step
With this lengthy but important step complete we have now started the process of getting the production samples made. I anticipate it will take at least six weeks until we are in receipt of these (there are many SKUs in this campaign). I will of course share a detailed update on these when I am receipt of them as any final production run will be based on approval of the production samples.
Tariffs
I am sure many of you will have seen the tabletop industry press releases recently from many of our our peers who have been really hard and are struggling right now because of the impacts of tariffs and the cost that implies to them landing their goods in the USA. For those that have not, right now if we were to manufacture the game and have it delivered to the USA for you we would currently be hit with a 145% tariff on the cost of those good landing from China. For many of our peers this has had a dramatic impact on their business and on the industry in general.
We are not immune to this cost increase, it was never budgeted for in any way and we would not be able to absorb it. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and in no way am I going to say this is planned but right now it is a good thing for the project that our games are currently not on a boat waiting to be offloaded into Jacksonville or whichever destinate port we use this time.
Many of our peers are taking action that we do not need to do so. What we believe is the sensible way forward here is to get the production samples made and then take stock of the situation (which is very dynamic) before deciding what the next steps are.
Roughly 50% of our backer base is in the USA and 100% of our manufacturing is carried out in China. Our manufacturing partner (Whatz Games) has been involved in the development of LU over the past nine years and are fundamental to us providing the production qualities that you expect for your games.
Right now all of our calculations around production quantities are completely upended. To even try to swallow some of the 145% cost we would have to manufacture significantly less than we had originally hoped. This would mean to retail tail and that would make it very difficult for us to continue making new LU products for you, which is what we want to do. To be clear right now, retail (in the US) is an extremely challenging proposition in any event and whatever we do will, I suspect, involve us having to divert far more of our retail products to the non-US market which gives us an interesting position where half of our crowdfunded customers are in the US but most of our retail customers are not.
We believe the correct course of action at this stage is to wait and see what comes next. The production samples will come through and we hope there will be far more clarity in the markets before we make any further announcements on the matter. Again, to be clear, our cost burn in IG is as low as it can be. Hugh and I do not take a salary for our work and have not gained financially in any way over the past 9 years making these games. We do this because we are gamers, and we want to make games and have fun with you all doing so. At times that has involved some financial pain for us as we make investments and decisions on what to do next. We're ok with everything we have done to date. What I don't want to do is make a commitment that would imperil us, the company and the project financially. We believe the right thing to so is to wait and see before hitting any button on production.
We hope given the current extreme situations that you can understand this stance.
Upgrade Packs Many of you have contacted us since the last update and I can confirm I have received those emails. We have not as yet pushed any button on charging for those as we need to see what is going to happen with the tariffs situation before we do anything in that regard.
Conventions We had already made the decision not to attend UKGE this year prior to any announcements on tariffs as we did not believe we would have stock available to sell at the time. We are still attending Tabletop Scotland this year.
Latest review
I thought you might like to see the latest review from BoardGameDuck on Instagram - the link is here:
REVIEW: Legends Untold: Illumination of Deepsorrow Novice Set by @inspiringgames
Legends Untold is a deeply thematic, immersive adventure that sits at that really interesting intersection between RPG and Dungeon Crawler. It's a cooperative game that has you play through a series of scenarios that unravel a rich world and storyline.
To play, you will choose a scenario and set up according to the scenario requirements, with each player choosing a character. You'll use dice to determine success or failure against a variety of challenge, and you'll delve into combat with raged and melee foes with a variety of powers and abilities.
Things I Liked: 🌑 The game has a well designed tutorial to introduce you to the game flow and rules. 🌑Without spoilers, the story/world was really engaging. The clues you find along the way lead you to excerpts that you read to fill in the world around you. The characters have genuinely funny scripts within the clues, which I enjoyed, too. 🌑 There are diverging scenario paths and multiple clues that can be found as you play, which makes the game more replayable to find all of the information. 🌑 I love that you can use this setting in an RPG. There is information in the rulebook that tells you how you might go about this. 🌑 The Potions & Preparations expansion adds a crafting system with ingredients and recipes to complete to give various bonus items. I loved this - I have a weird obsession with mushrooms, and there were so many mushrooms!
Things I Liked Less ⚔️ The combat was, for me, one of the least interesting aspects. The tokens were fairly small, and additionally, the melee for foes is tied to your roll as opposed to them fighting back, which felt a little underwhelming. ⚔️ There are a lot of books within the box currently, which makes it a little challenging to find the information you need. This is being addressed, so in the future, finding the information should be a lot easier.
Overall, this is a really enjoyable co-op adventure. If you're a fan of rich storylines and worlds you can really delve into, then this has a lot for you to love. The expansions add a lot of variability and add to a replayable experience.
Thanks
I want to express our thanks for your patience and support during this process. We have taken the game to a level I never thought we could achieve, we now need to get those samples made and hopefully weather the storm on tariffs so we can let you all start exploring Deepsorrow.
Best wishes to you all.
IG
Deepsorrow Campaign Guide changes - extra book, extra cards, Deluxe Upgrade Set, General update
over 1 year ago
– Sun, Jan 26, 2025 at 09:20:13 AM
Hey folks,
Campaign Guide improvements
I have some fantastic news for you, the Deepsorrow Campaign Guide has been proofed. We now have the last of the books across all of the sets added to the assembly list for Whatz. In particular I want to pass on my thanks to Targanth/Vern for his help on this - thank you so much!
This book was always going to be the hardest part of the project to proof because the original prototype is a couple of years old and we have made a number of improvements to the game since the initial prototype was made. As we finished our internal challenge we made a number of key improvements to the Deepsorrow Campaign Guide which I will share with you here. These improvements were incorporated into the proofed files.
Improvement 1 - Campaign Guide split into two books
We have added an extra book to the Deepsorrow set, called the Clue Directory. We did this because the original 124 page Campaign Guide was already a bit of a beast and as part of our stretch goals we added a further 8 Bonus Episodes, which we have now finalised as a Bonus Campaign (or you can play standalone as you desire). In addition to these extra pages we wanted to add some extra content around the Campaign ending which added further pages to the book too.
In practical terms we found that as you play the Campaign you will regularly be flicking around the Clue Directory section looking for the relevant Clue entry and then returning to the relevant Episode page in the Campaign Guide. This can be a lot of book flicking and bookmarking when you really want to focus on your adventure.
To save your sanity we have split the old Campaign Guide into two books:
A new smaller 64 page Campaign Guide covering the Campaign introduction, special rules, Episodes and the Bonus Campaign
a new 80 page Clue Directory which you use to access the relevant Clues entries as you need to.
Please note we have used the artwork from the original Campaign Guide on the new Clue Directory book as that particular piece fits the theme of discovery much better. We have used an action piece, showing the new Shock Condition rules being used, as the artwork on the new smaller Campaign Guide.
Improvement 2 - Tighter ending and how they work for Apprentice
I had to think hard about this one - how I can share a glimpse of what we have done without spoiling things? The image I have shown here is maybe a 1 x 2 inch sneak peek of a far larger piece we have added to the Campaign Complete page. We did not have this piece when we sent the prototype out and it has not been shared with anyone outside of IG apart from Vern (who was adamant he was OK with the spoilers). Outside of this crop is something really special to Mor Nadar, something that you will work towards as you play the Campaign. For now I will simply point out you can see the Envoy, Earthguide and Skygazer alongside their loyal polecat coming towards the end of their journey in a truly epic fashion. The art we have added to the project is very special to me and properly reflects the end of that journey.
I hope that's OK - trying to balance the real world coolness vs spoilers here folks!
Improvement 3 - extra cards
As we continued to iterate the endings for Deepsorrow and answer the 'what next?' question we realised that there is a smarter way to deal with unlockable endings. I can not share the pictures of the cards we have made as the spoilers would be far too high however we have now added two extra cards into Deepsorrow (at our cost) to enable you to unlock those endings in a far more fun manner and (depending on how uch of Deepsorrow you investigate) give you a simpler and easier way to choose your onward path. In practical terms this will make your 'save game' easier. If you manage to find one of the cards on your journey you will have the choice on whether to use it in your next session.
Improvement 4 - Story Track interface improvement
To make it simpler to find Clue entries really clearly we have adopted the three colours system from the Story Tracks so that you always know where you are going next. So if you are discovering more about the History of Deepsorrow (Green), People and Creatures (Red) or Ancient Artifacts (Blue) tracks it is now much easier to see that link in each section. Here is an example of the introduction to the Story Tracks from Deepsorrow below:
And here is an old vs new example of how the Story Track fonts are colour coded to make it simpler to find things.
Improvement 5 Extra art
When we launched the prototype we did not have all the art ready for the game. We always intended to go back and add in some of the pieces into the Campaign Guide so that you can see some of the cool artifacts and other things in greater detail across the book. We have now taken the opportunity to do that across the new Campaign Guide and Clue Directory to give you a more polished product with greater visibility of the art throughout.
I am trying to not show any clues here so I have blacked out the text from Clue 35 to show you the old 'space for art' in the original clue book.
And the revised version in the Clue Directory with the art added:
Here's another example from the new book:
And another:
And another:
We have repeated this process throughout both books.
Deluxe Upgrade
I said I would respond to you all when I know more. Firstly I wanted to say thanks to all of you who got in touch to register your interest, apologies it has taken me this long to come back to you, we were waiting on confirmation of some things from the manufacturer. About 50 of you have asked for the deluxe card sets. We have spoken to Whatz who have confirmed that we can make extra sets of the cards rather than break open complete games (which we would rather not do).
There are a couple of issues with the plan we had. The small production run makes things slightly more difficult for the manufacturer. Our fulfilment partners will also require some form of packaging for these cards otherwise we fear they may be missed out from your pledges as they are sent out - this will cause total chaos and not create a good experience for you. Finally when we actually look at the number of cards in the round from the Enhanced Editions for both sets and add in the Novice Booster Sets they actually come pretty close to 400 cards in total. This is a lot of cards!
Our original estimate was off. This is not an easy thing for us to do, but we want to give those of you who have asked for it the cards as you have asked for them. Unfortunately our original estimate of £5 will not cover our costs and need to revise that to £8 per set.
This is not something I write lightly as I don't enjoy coming back to you in this way. However many of you were asking for the sets and we had to do something to get the ball rolling and try to establish a pricing mechanism with the manufacturer, it turns out our landed cost estimate for a relatively bespoke production run was too light in this case - I'm sorry for that.
Please note we have not charged anybody anything for the Deluxe Upgrade kits to date, I also understand if some of you who previously wanted it no longer wish to do so. The price of the increase is roughly the price of a coffee, and we feel that the c. 400 cards of adventuring experience you will receive in return for that new £8 price is very good value, however that is clearly a decision for you to make.
We have now created that item on BackerKit. If you still wish to proceed with your deluxe Card Upgrade at the confirmed price of £8 (no additional shipping) then I would ask you to write once again to us at: [email protected] so that we can process accordingly.
Production Update and Lessons learned
A few of you have been asking about shipping estimates, delays and lessons learned.
What I would say here is that running this campaign is one of the hardest things I have had to in my life, period. Our goal was to please everyone, to create a standalone expansion for Legends Untold that introduced new concepts, let you explore the world in a much greater depth, and through better accessibility and an improved user interface make the game much easier to learn and play.
The challenge is that we are not doing this with just one product (Deepsorrow) but also revising the two other core sets (Caves and Sewers) and the existing and new expansions too. We are trying to do all of this to make the game exciting and new and easier to play for anyone new to Mor Nadar but we are also trying to look after all of you who have helped us on the journey to date. This is the right thing to do, but it's not easy. Every time we tweak something, we have to check what that means for every set and then for both new and existing backers alike.
This work all comes at a cost. I don't mean financially - we have been very prudent with the funds raised and other than completing art pieces that we needed for the games those funds are sitting where they should be - ready to be spent on manufacturing and shipping to get you your games. The cost I am referring to is time, we just only have so many hours in the week. IG is the product of two people with full time jobs and families supported by Morgan at Jovial who does Graphic Design, Art Direction and a host of other important tasks to help publish the games.
We are running at this as hard as we can. With the books now complete we are in conversations with Whatz about the final inserts and then we can finalise production numbers. We do understand you want your games and we know you have been waiting a long time for them very patiently - thank you. Apart from an illness which knocked me out for some months the delays we have encountered are because we are trying to give you the very best products we can and also trying to keep a diverse set of customer needs happy at all times.
My key lesson learned is in theory to keep it simple. In this case I'm just not sure how we could have done that other than not reprinting Caves and Sewers. If we had just created Deepsorrow and Potions & Preps and introduced the new format cards we would probably have created 60% less work for ourselves. Do I think that would have been the right result for you, the original backers who brought Mor Nadar to life?
No.
After we complete this project we have some other games in the line up we are looking at first. However for the planned Apprentice sets of Legends Untold, yes absolutely I do not want to be repeating the process in this manner again.
Wishing you all the best.
IG
V1 to V1.5 Foe Mapping, new cards, deluxe upgrade pack
over 1 year ago
– Thu, Jan 02, 2025 at 08:52:18 AM
Happy New Year folks!
Terminology For the sake of simplicity when I refer to V1 Foes I mean the cards that came with the original printing of Weeping Caves, Great Sewers and the Novice Treasure Set.
When I refer to V1.5 Foes these will be (subject to to any final changes) in the format of those shown in Update 42 with the increases to text space, font, set icon and card code.
V1 to 1.5 Foe Mapping The responses to the previous update were almost unanimous - you want the new format to be adopted across all the cards (including the Foes) as not doing so would be to the detriment of the game. However some of you have expressed concerns about cards matching across sets.
We have banged our heads together and scenario planned a number of use cases:
(a) playing original Caves/Sewers + Upgrade pack (b) playing Enhanced Caves/Sewers (c) playing Deepsorrow (d) combining Enhanced Caves/Sewers with Deepsorrow (e) combining original Caves/Sewers with Deepsorrow
If you play scenario a) or e) and we upgrade the Foes to v1.5 you will always have a mismatch of Foes between V1 and V1.5.
We debated about making the Upgrade pack having V1 Foes only and using V1.5 for all the other products, this would make the Upgrade pack Foes more visually backward compatible with the original Foe cards and eliminate that concern.
On the other hand it would of course mean that those of you who bought the new content and wanted so use the Enhanced Edition Foes with their Deepsorrow Set would then be mixing V1 and V1.5 Foes - so we would be disadvantaging that group of our backers.
In the end we think the fairest way to do this is to add in a copy of all of the V1.5 Foes from the Weeping Caves EE Set, the Great Sewers EE Set, and the NB1 Set into the Novice Booster Upgrade pack. That means that anyone who is receiving the Upgrade pack as part of their pledge or because they have purchased it separately will now have a V1.5 upgraded version of all of the original Foe cards.
I have tried to represent where the Foes sat originally and where they sit going forward in the diagram below. Please note, as per the key the numbers in each set outside the brackets represent unique Foes and the numbers inside the brackets represent total Foe Cards. We have included multiple copies of certain Foe cards in the second printing whereas all Foe cards were unique in the first printing. This is intentional as it improves the feel / likelihood of drawing a certain Foe type in some of the Scenarios.
What does this mean for me? If your pledge includes a Novice Upgrade set you don't need to do anything else. The Upgrade set was previously going to include the 3 extra Foes from the WC EE set and the 3 extra Foes from the GS EE set. It will now include 43 Foe cards rather than 6 Foe cards.
What is the cost? We will absorb the cost for this in an effort to give you all parity across your sets. Please note we can not do this for all of the other card types, however we believe that giving you the Foe cards and the previously mentioned Party Table Test cards in your sets will address any concerns about card matching.
What about the other cards? Please note we already have a large number of SKUs for this project, every other SKU we add makes the chances of errors at fulfilment (often well beyond our control) even more likely. For those that absolutely have to have all of their other cards matching (note we do not think this is necessary but we are trying to accommodate those of you who say that it is important to you) we are going to try to offer a complete set of all the Caves, Sewers and Novice Booster 1 cards as part of a Deluxe Upgrade pack. If you wish to partake of this we can offer this to you for an additional £5 on top of your base pledge.
If you wish to only purchase the Deluxe Upgrade pack we can offer that to you for £24 instead of the original £19.
Please note I need to caveat this heavily. Demand will dictate how easy it is for us to make this happen, it may be that we need to make the Upgrade packs as standard and then ship the cards beside them in your final box not actually in the Upgrade pack.
What about the pledge manager? A number of you have asked for us to reopen the pledge manager so you can add more products to your pledge (dividers, additional sets etc). There is no intention to charge a second shipping charge on any additional items, I know that has been a concern for a few of you.
If you want to add additional items including the Deluxe Upgrade pack please email us at: [email protected] it is the easiest way for us to keep track of any changes you want to make to your pledge.
I hope the above is clear, with the issue around Foes now resolved we will resume final pre-press proofing and start getting those files ready for the manufacturer.
Thanks
IG
Important changes to cards as per feedback on previous updates
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Dec 30, 2024 at 02:15:17 PM
Hi folks,
We have taken on board the mixed feedback you gave us on the previous update and now propose a slight change in direction.
Some of you were very positive about the new format. Some of you were very positive but also don't like the fact that some of your cards will look slightly different from your existing cards.
This is a tricky one for us to solve as we are in danger of making no decision (and delaying manufacturing further) because we can not make everybody happy.
Arguably the simplest solution is to change none of the cards at all - we really think this is the wrong call, the introduction of the Environment flags make the filing system and the dividers over half of you have added to your pledge far more intuitive, we are trying to make sure the other half of the card filing system (the set icon and card code) is equally up to scratch.
We therefore think that the best decision is to proceed as follows:
Make the changes to Set Icon and Card Code to all cards except Foes as per the previous update. This will improve accessibility for all which we think is really important and alongside the Environment Icon flags make it much easier to find and store your cards. These changes are cosmetic in nature, improve readability and do not change how your existing cards from the first printing work in any way.
We will no longer update the Foes and leave them as per the version shown as at the latest improvement a while back. Please note these cards will not have the increased Set Icon and Card Code on them - there just isn't the space to accommodate this in the old format.
Here is an example of that format below - you can see it does not vary massively from your existing Foe cards.
I wanted to address a few other concerns here.
The Occupation card darkness on new card vs old Please rest assured there is nothing to worry about on this front, we will be adjusting brightness levels in pre-press to ensure consistency across sets.
Placement of Card Code next to text on some cards (e.g. the Formori Huntsword). The reason it looks like there is space to move the card code is because I showed you the full card plus bleed and cut marks as it would go to printer. The actual card is much smaller than this, then within that card we have a mandatory safety level that we need to abide by.
I have cropped this export to the dieline (red) and the safety margin level (yellow). You can see we have no more space to move that Card Code down the way. We also can not easily move the text up the way away from the Card Code en masse as the master files have not been built this way. Doing this would involve complete remerges of all cards after that remaster which will add even further delays to the project. We can however - probably- manual nudge the text up (where space permits) on a number of these card to give that floating space around the card code where desired. Please note this would be on a best endeavours basis though, there are probably a few cards in the game where there is so much information on the card we simply can not accommodate the proposed nudge.
What does this mean for my Upgrade pack? As per Update 8 and Update 31 we will include the following:
A white tuck box (roughly A4 sized) with a barcode on it.
2x Readiness tracker Double poker cards
2x Punchboards from the Weeping Caves reprint
2x Punchboards from the Great Sewers reprint
2 replacement cards for the Caves and Sewers that have slight errors in them
2x replacement Adventures for the Weeping Caves set
PDFs of the Core Rulebook
All of the additional cards we unlocked from the Weeping Caves Enhanced Edition and Great Sewers Enhanced Edition
another 23* reprinted cards (covering the Caves and Sewers and Caves EE and GS EE Party Basic Tests) (see Update 31)
We hope the above is clearer, please let us know if you have any questions. We need to move on with production now and believe the proposal outlined above should be the most satisfactory to the majority of you.
Wishing you all the best for the New Year when it comes to you!
Cheers IG
Accessibility, Foe card improvement,
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Dec 28, 2024 at 02:14:32 PM
Hey folks
Seasons Greeting to those who celebrate at this time of year!
As we are doing final changes for manufacturing I wanted to share our final accessibility tweak.
Why are we doing this?
Feedback from the first printing was that you enjoyed many aspects of the game, particularly the exploration side but you wanted (among other things):
more stuff (hence all the loot)
more about the world (hence the increased Campaign Guides with the Clues system in Deepsorrow)
less fiddly components (hence the change to tokens you will see in the punchboards)
an easier way to learn/revise the game (hence Totackyn's Guide/Flowcharts and the 'How to Play')
As much help as possible to read/find the cards - especially the card codes (hence this update)
On the last point I have to say since we launched IG in 2016 (yep we are 8 years old now folks) my eyesight has changed considerably and I am totally onboard with upscaling font sizes wherever it is practical!
The last point was always something we were going to leave to the end though as we wanted to catch it in the final proof and update all cards and books accordingly. I'm pleased to say we are at that stage now. We have spent the past three weeks or so tweaking all of the cards to accommodate our final planned accessibility change.
We have increased the Set Icon on each card by nearly 25% from 2.1mm to 2.6mm and have increased the Card Code Font by 67% from 4.5 pts to 7.5pts.
Note with the exception of Foes (further detailed below) we have not adjusted any other text on the cards as there is simply not the real estate or the time to do so. The Foes were a special case as of course you will be fighting them many times and because of other changes to the game (like the introduction of the Battlefield and Creature tokens) we have been able to figure out a better way of doing those cards.
Note this has been a material amount of work because of all the different card templates we use in LU. I will endeavour to demonstrate the changes below with 'old vs new' pictures.
This is an example of a Booby Trap card from the Sewers Enhanced Edition below - note how much easier it is to see the card icon and code:
For Events we have opened the Legendary Effect box to become full bleed now (in effect a hanging framed golden cloth/parchment) as we do with some of our other card types. This makes the Card Code far more visible and actually makes the Sewer Environment on the right far easier to see also.
For Loot we have again continued with the open parchment technique to gain the same accessibility benefits. This card here is pretty full and shows well why we can not increase the font size any further on any theme text. We asked you about this a while back and the feedback we received before was 'better to have it even if small rather than not at all'.
For Occupations note we have tweaked the card frame slightly to make it more visible and also you can see the impact of the suggested starting build on the right (I have only shown the bottom part of each card here).
And for Outfits the change is relatively straight forward.
Foes Note for this section the data should be the same on both cards, we just wanted to show you an update of the Foe redesign card and have not input all the data yet.
We took a slightly different approach with Foe cards as it is quite clear when you are in Combat you really want to be able to read those cards as easily as possible, and some of the new rules we have introduced were really using up the limits of the space we had available from the original design.
We had already listed various iterations of the Foe card we have been making during this kickstarter. To the left you can see a card which looks similar to but not identical to the original Foe format you had with the first printing of Weeping Caves and Great Sewers.
To the right we have managed to improve the font size materially. The additional space we have taken for the text meant we therefore had to solve for getting the horizontal information added to the column to the left. This also let us add a few improvements we wanted to so that it is even simpler to read the card.
The markup below explains what we mean here - the old card on the left has all the same data points as the new card but you crisscross up and down the card to find the data point you need. The new card on the right has everything in simple logical order. Also graphically there are a couple of improvements going on here:
The Health icon has been changed to a small red heart which matches the hard coded heart on each Creature token making it more intuitive as to what it refers to.
We have used different shades for Melee and Ranged to hit and damage so it is really clear what refers to what.
Other cards We are working on the other card types (mostly the test cards - basic, staged, table) just now in parallel with final proofing.
I want to share with you an update on punchboard changes and books next time (all of which are required to make sure Whatz can fit the components and inserts into those boxes).
For now though we hope you can look forward to being able to read and find those cards more easily as we complete this final accessibility tweak.
