When establishing the art style of Bullfrogs, I told John I wanted something "colorful, but something that doesn't specifically read as a kid's game."  For the cover, I wanted to see "a strong central figure or 2 in the foreground. Make sure there are some lily pads being fought over."  Check out the various stages of development as the cover artwork for Bullfrogs evolved.

I really enjoyed the back and forth during this process.  It took about 2 weeks go get a finished piece.  John was sending me images daily to start with.  I was always excited to see the latest update.

Till next time.

- Keith

The cards in Bullfrogs are the central component of the game. Players hold them. They play them. They make up the board. They give players points to win. So, yeah. It was kind of important to get them looking good and functioning well. I'm going to step through the various stages of their existence and discuss the changes at each stage. Below is an example of the "2 action" card.

There are 3 important pieces of information on the card. 1) The number of actions. 2) The number of spaces and 3) The color of the card. So, card #1 is what I started with.

After some play testing, I found players didn't like counting up the number of spaces to determine how many points the card was worth at the end of the game. So with #2, I included that number on the bottom portion of the card. I also added a random symbol on the card to help color blind players and also help people see the differences a little easier. I'm up to 4 elements to read/understand on each card.

I playtested with #2's card design for a long time. It's actually the design I released as the print and play version. I still didn't have a theme yet. I was considering keeping it themeless and #3 here is my attempt at making something "cool" yet themeless with various clipart. This version got very little play.  I only have one copy of that version and by the time I went to playtest it, I had decided on the frog theme and had artwork coming in from John Ariosa.

I tested with #4 for quite a while as well. This used John's illustration, but I hadn't signed Luis up to do the graphic design yet.

#5 is the final layout. I worked with Luis Francisco for many weeks to settle on this. The design goals included minimizing the components, maximizing the clarity, and highlighting the illustration as much as possible. Each army's faction symbol, color and the spaces were all combined together into the spaces. The action number is differentiated into a symbol instead of a number, so it wouldn't be confused with the victory point number.  

I think it hits all the goals we set out to accomplish, and Luis did a great job. It's surprising to me that the core design of the cards from day 1 didn't change much by the time we finalized them.

Till next time.

- Keith