You really know when you’ve drawn a cool Achroma card from your Palette! To us, this harks back to the playground appeal of ‘shiny’ trading cards and stickers, but with a next-gen twist to add something fresh. Rare and Legendary Achroma cards benefit from luxurious glossy embossed details which really pop due to the contrasting matt finish. Achroma cards also have a matt finish, which gives them, in our opinion, a unique look and feel. We were however able to keep things at a nice sturdy 300gsm, meaning Achroma cards are far thicker than those of leading trading card games. Judging from the response of those who handled our cards at playtesting, demos and events, we were on the right track. But things we kept all along were the thickness of the cards and the special finish of the rarer cards. As Chronicles became Achroma, the game rules, design and final product evolved. Fortunately, artist Matt Vince had created illustrations and the foundations of a layout with this in mind. That was a challenge as the trade off could be legibility. An Achroma card should be a window into that world (or realm) with information floating in an overlay. Influences were mobile games like Monument Valley and Pokémon Go where a UI is minimal, if not non-existent.
Jack was insistent that we didn’t obscure artwork and crowd the design of Achroma cards with text boxes like so many other card games. These first generation Achroma card samples featured an earlier version of the design layout and game text but the high quality look and feel was there right from the start. Aside from the stunning Ghibli-inspired artwork, it was the printed prototypes Jack handed me that made me realise both he and this project were to be taken seriously. “I want our cards to feel good when you hold them.” That was one of the first things our Managing Director, Jack Constantine, said to me when he introduced this project that he and co-founder, Chris Hillman, were working on.
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