Snap Ships Tactics

Starter Box & Accessory Boxes

The basic building block of the Snap Ships toy line (upon which the Snap Ships Tactics game is based), is a cube. All of the packaging for the game keeps this theme and shares some of the same sci-fi styled shapes as the building pieces.

Card Designs

Each ship in the game uses two card types: a chassis card provides its base stats and special ability and part cards provide a wide range of additional capabilities. You can build your ship however you like, but the back of each chassis card provides some guidance for a preset build and recommended parts.

There are over a hundred part cards in the game, but the following set of icon types appear across all of them, making their effects easy to understand and compare.

Each of the preset ship builds also has a corresponding deck of 4 cards for use as an automated opponent. Whenever an automated ship takes a turn, draw a card and step through its instructions instead of using chassis and part cards. The images of the various parts let you know how it’s doing what it does so you can learn from these opponents when building your own ships.

As a Kickstarter exclusive, we added alt-art chassis cards and exclusive pilots with crazy one-time gameplay effects. All of the pilot art came from concept artwork for the Snap Ships webseries, and the pilots needed a different card template to differentiate it from part cards (which are the same shape).

Tracker Dials & Tokens

Each ship also uses a tracker dial to mark its remaining hull points and current evasion rating. Other tokens are for keeping track of the first player each round, which ship belongs to which team in larger games, and any missiles that have been launched. The backside of each missile token shows its gameplay effects the same way a part card does.

Punchboard sheet layouts (front and back) for the two sheets in the starter box. In addition to the layout, I also did all the illustration for the mechanical-looking hull tracker dials, the terrain tiles, and the missiles.

Playmat Illustrations

I illustrated a set of 4 different playmats as a promotion for the Kickstarter campaign. Each one is 36×36″ at print resolution, and gave us an image bank of assets to reposition and crop to use for the backgrounds of cards and packaging. This greatly helped unify the look of the whole project.

Rulebook Layout

The rules booklet for the game weights in at 40 pages, which seems like a lot of text until you realize that the full rules fit on 10 pages and half of every spread is artwork and diagrams. The booklet features a “your first game” section at the front to make it easy for players to get started upon opening the box, followed by more elaborate custom ship-building rules for your second game and beyond, and a series of scenarios to play.

The back cover of the rulebook functions as a player aid for the common steps of the game, as well as what all of the icons mean. Each section also has a callout to the corresponding page of the rulebook so you can easily find the full rules text. The instruction booklets from the Snap Ships toy line were also given a front & back cover refresh to match the Snap Ships Tactics look.

You can browse all the various ships and their cards, as well as download the rulebook PDF on the Snap Ships Tactics website at https://www.snapshipstactics.com/