December 28, 2011.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my 1.0 homebrew redesign of Gnostica. The current version of the game, while extremely fun and awesome, requires a Tarot deck to play, as well as a fair amount of memorization of which card does what. There are stickers you can apply to your Tarot to help you remember, but the learning curve can be intimidating for those new to the game. The Tarot cards themselves might be kind of a turn-off too, depending on the person. They give the game a Renaissance Fair vibe that is by no means integral to the game experience. There have been some other attempts at Tarot-less decks, but I wanted to take my own crack at it.

Here’s a typical game in progress, using Looney Pyramids as game tokens:

I went for a more iconic approach, annotating each card with a brief summary of its abilities. Here are some samples from my deck. I still need to put icons on the card corners.

This is the full set of cards, along with a set of rule cards.

Here’s the original art for the Moon card, before I did all the Photoshop and graphics tablet trickery to it.