MANIA! is a Finnish card game. It has bunch of cards and bunch of games. From the original description, I thought the cards would be almost a regular pack, but there are actually a lot more cards in various suits and colours. The rulebook lists seven different games, some variations from classics, some more innovative. I haven’t tried any, but it looks like something casual gamers might find entertaining. Nothing too adventurous, but not like the old stuff either.
Now shooting card game photos is always a bit of a challenge. In this case I decided not to try to fake some actual game play photos, so this shoot became more like a product photo challenge. I was trying to come up with something interesting that would show the viewer how the game looks like.
Again, click the pictures to see larger versions in BoardGameGeek (and thumb the photos there if you like them).
Let’s start with the box cover shot.
I thought the cards made a good background for the box. They also look manic enough. Creating a nice background of cards like that is surprisingly hard, covering all the gaps is difficult. There’s some table visible in the picture, but it’s not bad… A perfectionist could of course fix that in an image editor with couple of minutes’ editing.
Here are the four main characters in the game. This photo was actually taken before the previous one. I started by shooting just mixed cards, all face up, then came up with the idea of picking out the main characters, then decided to turn all the other cards face down to make the important cards stand out, then I decided to try the box on top of the cards…
Here the difficult thing was to get all four cards in focus. It’s not perfect, but this was the best I got in the limited time I had. The photo is somewhat cropped to make the important cards larger.
Here are face-up cards. These are just one suit, the pig character, so you can see the different styles even within one suit. This is a bit dark, now that I look at it, it could use some adjustment to make it slightly lighter.