I'm trying to design a board game (and am not an artist) but want to ensure that I've got some practical aspects designed appropriately for the layout of a card. I tried asking on boardgames.stackexchange.com but the community felt here would be a better fit.
There are going to be a range of cards that have a 'track' on it with multiple branches (the top section in the image), each requiring a dice roll of a particular colour. If that dice roll is obtained then you can move to the next one - if there is a branch you can choose either route.
If a dice roll fails then there is a consequence, currently illustrated via a 'Failure Track' at the bottom. The different symbols will have a meaning that is documented. So in this example:
- Red 6 fail = thumbs down
- Green 5 fail = trash can
- Blue 6 fail = tear
- Blue 14 fail = tear
These symbols can mean complete fail (i.e. stop progressing on this card), or continue but you may have some form of a penalty to pay. I need to illustrate the failure consequence for each roll somehow. I should note that you only ever follow the main track - the 'Failure Track' has paths on just to help illustrate which symbol you need by tallying it up with the track with dice rolls on.
The top track could get quite complex, and if (unlike in this example) there are different consequences for a failed dice roll in the same column, then the failure track will become quite complicated and compressed. I don't however want this area to take up too much space.
There are also some circumstances where you may be required to roll more different dice (e.g. Green 5 and Red 6. Up to a max of 4 colours) at the same time, and roll higher than both numbers, which would essentially combine two circles on the diagram at one point.
I'm wondering if a better approach might be to remove the bottom track completely and change the top track to have blobs like:
This however crams quite a lot of potential information onto a single circle (especially if there are 4 colour segments on the left). I'm wondering which of these is best or if there is another alternative approach that I could use to visualize this information clearly?