Since moving away from the texture printed cards, i've been investigating what the best way to show that a card is a genuine card.

visually is the quickest way to tell. the feeling based mechanic would've been way too time consuming... And players would still Need to look to see which genuine card it is.

Originally i had a stamped version of the words 'fake' and 'genuine'

 ItThey worked. But thats all they did...

They didn't add to the art or the style. The paintings are wrapped up for shipping - to dispose of if they don't sell at the black market.

I fiddled around with the idea of a customs stamp, tried a few templates of one. I even considered UV spotting over the painting part of the card.

in the end i settled on a very small, very simple 'seal', which is ascetically very pleasing!

It was originally a seal with a letter g inside it - for 'Genuine'. i preferred the shape of the 'a' and the term 'seal of authenticity'!!

And thats it, the evolution of the genuine artwork!

​Big Man Murph.

Okay, where to start? Let's start With more questions...

Sometimes you need to take a step back and decide 'is all this extra work worth it? is the huge extra cost worth it? Is the time and effort that it'll cost me worth it? Will anyone even know the difference if i change it now?'

No.

I'm talking about an element in dodgy dealers that i REALLY wanted to deliver on. That unique game mechanic that involved players relying on touch to determine if a card was real or not. it sounded so cool. It certainly would've been an extra draw to the game, but ultimately was too ambitious a feature to include. especially for my very first kickstarter; I've enough things to get a grip on without worrying about The texture of an over ambitious feature!
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As you can see above, I got the Painting like texture looking really well on the cards, also very happy with how the silhouette turned out on the figure. what you'll see in the next picture below is the back of the same card. to get a nice impression that is noticeable by touch, you risk marking the back of the card - thus ruining the game...
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​If people could see a facedown card is genuine because of the marks on the back, game broken. So its too risky as well as too expensive, time consuming and even too uncontrollable. it would be impossible to quality control it.

How could I solve this problem? 

​Thicker Cards - although the card in the picture above is already a 300 gsm card. This would work, but 88 cards in a deck is already quite a large tuck box... what wouldn't work is trying to shuffle a deck of 'Business cards' - which would really be what they would be most like...

Hybrid cards - two different paper types stuck together to provide more strength. Same problems as with the solution above.

I could also not make the emboss as deep or as sharp - this definitely wouldn't work as its difficult to get the Feeling of the painting already. if anything it would need to be pressed harder into the cards...

but thats it... Overall, i think its time to shelf the idea, with the hope the revisit it at a later date.

I'm disappointed, but happy that I'm able to part with it. Its nice that I can separate my feelings towards the mechanic and still drop it because logically its too little reward for all the risks involved.

Hopefully things will progress smoother from here on out...

Big Man Murph.