Even good layout can suffer from information overload

Cards are an integral part of modern game design, and they can be surprisingly effective at mitigating rule overload and assiting with asset management. However, there's a balance to be found in what a card contains. Put too much information on a card, and it becomes a burden to read and retain, but put too little and the card feels superfluous and like it's adding clutter to the asset inventory.

Keeping cards distinct

One common problem with cards in modern tabletop games is the sheer number of card decks in the box. I've played a game with over 35 distinct decks (where a "deck" is defined by a distinct card back), and it wasn't even a card game. Obviously an extreme case like that means that a significant amount of time that ought to be spent playing the game is instead spent organising assets, but it was also difficult for the game creators to keep cards distinct from one another.

Mansions of Madness only has 7 decks and I still confuse Conditions with Spells, at least at a glance. On the other hand, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game has a lot of decks, and it's very manageable both between game sessions and during. Pathfinder Adventure Card Game even uses mostly uniform card backs, so it doesn't even have the benefit of providing visual cues. Another obvious example of this is Magic: The Gathering, which also has uniform backs but never fails to broadcast the card type in the dead centre of each card.

When you've got lots of card decks, you have to make it painfully obvious what purpose each card plays in the game. When possible, use more than one of these tricks to help reinforce the same information without actually restating it:

• Give cards highly distinctive backs.
• Spell out in plain language what the card is, so it's easy to match the card with any reference to it in the rulebook (or on another game asset).
• Use varying card sizes as appropriate.
• And probably don't have 35 distinct decks.

Unified messaging

Suppose you're designing a game in which one deck of cards is the Royalty deck. You ensure that all cards marked Royalty have a checkered back, and consistently feature a crown in the artwork of the card face. With just a few design choices, you've told your player that the card is a Royalty card 3 times:

1. Once explicitly, with the written word "Royalty"
2. Once through the visual cue of a checkered back
3. Once through the visual cue of a crown in the artwork

It's important that visual cues don't compete with the explicit declaration of the card type, and instead reinforces it. Nobody would think to look up "what does the card with the checkered back do?" or "what do the cards with people wearing a crown mean?" because they understand that those elements are common to the specific kind of "Royalty" card.

On the other hand, were you to write "Royalty" at the top of the card face, and then also put a Crown icon in a little bubble in the bottom corner, and then use wildly unique artwork in the inset, then you're suggesting to the player that each of these elements are entirely distinct. Players are likely to wonder what a Royalty card with the Crown icon means, and whether a Royalty Crown card with knight artwork is different from a Royalty Crown card with queen artwork. They're interpreting elements meant to reinforce a single concept as 3 separate concepts, because there's nothing to unify them.

Too much is not sufficient

Cards have a finite surface area. You can only cram so much onto a card before it's got so much data on it that it ceases to be a sufficient means of conveying information.

The common Poker deck is exemplary at conveying information with minimal data. Everything you need to know about what a card represents is provided in 3 distinct components of a internally consistent pattern:

1. Icon of a specific suit
2. Colour
3. Number value

Then again, there's no indication of the significance of a 4-of-a-kind or a Full House, and so on. Because the cards are divorced of rules, it makes a Poker deck equally suitable for Blackjack and Bridge and other games. It's a sacrifice we continue to make when designing cards for Poker, and seems worth it.

Games like Flesh and Blood and Magic: The Gathering convey a lot of information in relatively little data. There's a card title, a resource value, cost, strength, and toughness. Most of the card's real estate is spent on artwork, which has no function in the games.

As much as I enjoy the Fantasy Flight Conquest card game, I'm comfortable admitting that its card designs are entirely non-intuitive. Of the 3 number values on a card face, not one has any hint to its meaning. Hit points, strength, cost? Cost, resource value, strength? There's no way of telling.

Conversely, some games put entirely too much data and too much context on a card. Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood features decks upon decks of cards comically overloaded with data, with watermark icons to match card compatibility to valid character classes, card backs with barely-distinguishable shifts in pattern to differentiate between characters and monsters, vast amounts of text, several different versions of essentially the same cards, entire decks specific to chapters but also to specific phases within rounds of combat (you never stop wondering whether a number denotes the chapter or the phase), and much more.

Variables are taxing

Ultimately, a card's design is determined by the number of variables you have in your game. Nobody would accuse Magic: The Gathering or Flesh and Blood of being simple games, and yet their card designs are surprisingly minimalist. As with a Poker card, you must know the rules for the data on the cards to be useful, but once you know the core mechanics then the cards expand those mechanics in an easy and recognisable way. That's the goal for most cards, whether the card is used in a card game, a board game, or just as a handy reminder of how the game works.