My wife and I have started playing Aeon's End, a co-op deck building game. We mostly play co-op games together, and not games I design. I don't know why I don't leverage our game time to test games, but I don't. Maybe if I make a game about flying dragons around frying things with a light dating simulator aspect to it, she'll be really interested in something I make. But that's not the point of this post. Playing Aeon's End immediately brought me face-to-face with one of my old enemies: single-point tokens. In Aeon's End, they're used for counting health points on enemies. I fucking HATE these. I received the game Interceptor Ace as a gift recently. I'm not knowledgeable about the subject matter and didn't know anything about the game, but I like airplanes and wargames. I'm also a loser with no friends so I like solitaire gaming. I fired the game up, played it a bit, and don't like it for a variety of reasons. But the main takeaway I got from it is the importance of well laid-out player aids. Interceptor Ace is not a particularly complex game but it's heavily reliant on referencing charts. Unfortunately, the way the charts are placed on the player aids is done in an irritating manner, requiring constant flipping, searching and general manipulation. I didn't end up digging this game much, but it did impress on my some principles I'd like to try to adhere to in the design of player aids from here on, though. Then I started designing Afterglow, I wanted it to feature actions being set under time pressure double-blind. That was the central feature I wanted. This is easy to do using some component configurations that I can easily make myself, but I also wanted things to be easily replicated by print-and-play people who would like to play the game, without relying on elaborate components that most people won't make.
Additionally, since action markers are also essentially the core of interaction during games, they need to have some important properties:
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