Bolted Game – Design Diary & Playtests

My new card game, Bolted — which has less than a week left in its crowdfunding campaign — is a fun way for anyone to make Wondermark-style characters of their own.

The basic premise of the game, which is that each player is racing to build a composite character out of parts, shares certain qualities with the comics themselves.

One of the most enjoyable parts of making Wondermark comics for me is locating and assembling just the right characters and props. It’s a process that’s mostly invisible (though you can also watch it happen), but I hope some of that creative energy comes through when looking at the finished comics.

Not every comic is a hugely elaborate collage made of parts; sometimes it’s pretty straightforward. But even fairly simple comics can be made of a surprising number of individual pieces:

The original idea for Bolted was just “It’s fun to build weird guys.” The very first prototype that I used for initial playtesting had no Wondermark art at all; I just wanted to see how well the puzzle mechanic worked:

The first application of Wondermark art was also very simple — “what basic images do I have on hand right away?” I wanted to ensure it all worked as a game before spending a ton of extra time on the design of each individual card.

One of the most fun parts of this process since that initial version has been refining the artwork.

Besides the enjoyment of playing the game, I want each piece to be fun and interesting to look at by itself. So especially with some of the “robot-style” connector parts, it’s been a very rewarding process for me to apply ever-more layers of “make it weirder”:

There are 166 individual cards in the game and each day I keep noodling on them, swapping out a hand card for a more expressive one, or adding details to a foot card, or finding better-looking epaulets for a body card. It’s really fun!

And there’s still another art pass to come — all the final cards will be in full color, similar to this:

I’m just waiting to finalize the designs before heading them down the conveyor belt into coloring.

It’s very hard to decide which has been more fun, working on all the art, or the game mechanics themselves!

Because my “north star” with the gameplay itself has been, “what makes building these characters the most fun and interesting?”

Which is exactly the same thing I’ve been doing on my own, while working on on the art.

Get your copy of the game here!

Want to help playtest?

I’ve opened up more remote playtesting times for the coming week, which are hosted by me personally:

It’s been REALLY fun playing the game with randos like you (term of endearment!) and I think the game gets better after each round of feedback.

Sign up to play here!

I am ALSO ready to start opening up UNSUPERVISED playtesting, which means, you read the rules and play the game by yourself. The goal of that is to provide feedback on how clearly the rules are written.

If you’d like to play with your own group — we use a web browser, so you can either play remotely via video chat, or you can play IRL if everyone has a laptop — you can sign up for that here and I’ll follow up with detailed instructions!

Here’s a character created in the online version: