Producing an unauthorized expansion pack for our most-played game
Like all nerds who have spent too many waking hours in front of a computer, me and my friends like to play (and make) tabletop games as an excuse to get together and argue. Many games have made an appearance, but for 16 years one game has remained a constant presence: Agricola.
After 16 years of farm-building experience, with exposure to all the existing expansion packs and variants, we were chock-full of ideas to improve our favorite game.
What if we made our dream expansion pack for Agricola?
Like all successful projects, we begin with data collection. Luckily the results of every one of our Agricola games has been logged and charted over the years:
This makes it very easy to see what strategies each of us enjoy, as well as the areas we could use support. Since this is our dream expansion pack, each player will be able to propose the modifications that they would like to see in the game.
Agricola implements many of its unique mechanics using themed card decks (with names like: E-Deck, I-Deck, K-Deck, etc.) containing Occupations for players to perform and Minor Improvements for them to build:
Agricola expansion packs are typically implemented as new card decks to replace or supplement the standard card decks:
We will continue the tradition and produce our own deck. For a name, we will go with an inside joke: P-Deck. (our Counterstrike clan back in the early 2000s was known as [pWn])
Our process will be:
To produce authentic-looking Agricola cards, we will start with authentic Agricola cards.
By scanning selected examples from the default Occupation and Minor Improvement decks, we can assemble a collection of all the visual components and iconography which can appear on a legal Agricola card:
In Photoshop, we can isolate all these individual components:
And prepare blank templates to start from (one for Occupations, the other for Minor Improvements):
For the unique illustrations which depict each Occupation and/or Minor Improvement, we create a template which we can fill with appropriately cartoonish imagery in the style of the original Agricola cards:
With all of these visual components isolated, we are now able to combine and layer them as appropriate to build any possible Agricola card. Doing this manually would become tedious, and we will likely want to make modifications to our cards as a result of playtesting, so a programmatic approach would be ideal. Enter nanDECK.
nanDECK is a scripting language used for creating a deck of cards based upon a database. It can combine text and visual elements based upon scripted logic, significantly reducing the amount of work required when making changes due to playtesting - you can simply update the database and generate a deck of updated cards in seconds.
We can use Google Sheets as our database:
By referencing the metadata in our database, our nanDECK script pulls in all the appropriate visual elements:
Running the script produces authentic-looking Agricola cards per our specifications:
Printing the cards out on cardstock and manually cutting them out works fine for playtesting purposes:
Over the course of many playtests, we took note of how many times a card was drafted and played, if the person winning the game had played it, how difficult it was to achieve the requirements of the card, and how many times the positive effects of the card we utilized:
We also recorded any thoughts we had for improving / balancing the cards that were played:
After each playtest, changes were made and a new revision was printed for future playtests.
The fifth revision of the P-Deck felt stable and complete, it was time to have the cards professionally made.
With the enormous popularity of tabletop gaming in the last decade, getting a deck of cards produced has become a simple problem to solve. We simply prepare PDFs in the appropriate layout and send them to the production house offering the best prices. Within weeks, we have our deck.
Designing a deck sleeve to hold the cards would be a nice finishing touch. As it stands, the P-Deck exists only as loose cards.
If you’d like to print your own copy of P-Deck, get it here!
