Got my Celestial Stick People color test in the mail yesterday. Wheeee!

So here’s what you get:

A Postal Service box. It’s big. And filled with lots and lots of paper.

Wrapped up in all that paper, you get a tuckbox. (It’s not shrinkwrapped, which I kind of like. Shrinkwrap is icky.) The box feels very sturdy and crisply constructed.

Sadly, I did my math wrong and this test box contains only 65 cards, not the 78 a real deck would have. So it looks a bit loose here. I just tried padding it out with regular playing cards, and everything still fits fine with 80something cards so I think we’re ok.

The instructions come as three separate, folded pieces of paper. I’m kinda bummed about that — you have to sort the pages by hand, so I’m glad they’re numbered — but I don’t think it’s a dealbreaker. If I could squish the card reference onto two sheets of paper and have the instructions by themselves on one sheet, that might make all this feel more logical, but I’m pretty sure that’s not really doable.

Unfolded, the rules are perfectly readable at least. The folds in the paper are nice and crisp; it’s not like you unfolded a crumpled up sheet here.

And here are the cards. The registration is ok, and a couple of the 5 sets of samples I got have nice looking colors. They don’t really have that new card smell. Not exactly important, but I was surprised.

So back to the rules.

I’d already been considering a ‘deluxe’ edition to complement the regular version. It would come in a big cardboard box almost 11 inches on a side (with a custom label, but not custom printed on all sides) and a foldable 18×18 board, something like this:

I still have a long way to go on the design here, but the point is, you get a nice board, and the rules will be folded less and presumably stapled.

Not sure if there’s really a lot of value there, and I don’t have a lot of time to do anything but grunty, scriptable prep work, but it’s worth considering I guess.