Zodiac

Release Date: February 2016
Set Size: 12 Buttons
Publisher: Button Men Online
Designers: Kaori
Artist: Caryad and Mia Steingräber

The Zodiac set is a twelve button set designed by Kaori. The artwork was licensed for button use only from artists Caryad ( www.caryad.de) and Mia Steingräber ( zeichenblog.mia-steingraeber.de). According to one of the artist's Deviant Art page, the images were done in conjunction with one another for a calendar based upon the zodiac.

According to Kaori in an interview conducted via Button Men Online:

The artwork inspired me in 2016 to make them into a Button Men set. And I thought it fun to have the zodiac theme to play with so I started creating a set as soon as I got the okay of the artists.
I wanted to have some thematic stuff depending on the zodiac sign (i.e. balanced dice sizes for Gemini and Libra). Especially these last two I wasn't happy with even after months of changing their recipes during playtesting (IRL and on the dev site) because these twin dice seemed to make them weaker than the rest. But I wouldn't kick the idea of these balancing dice and when we played the Zodiacs with other buttons outside the set they aren't as weak as I thought.
Most of all I wanted the set to be balanced within itself but I had some other self-made rules, too:

only 4 special skills in the whole set

of which each button will have 2

and one swing die between X and V.

The special skills I chose depending on the zodiac sign itself, some of them being obvious like Sagittarius having Speed and Scorpio having Stinger and Poison. Thematic elements include Speed for the weapon of Sagittarius or Stinger and Poison for Scorpio‘s tail, Aries will hide in the shadow and then run to you full Speed with his head bent low... I thought about every button to decide for at least one skill being especially important for each button. When you look at the recipes you can see it.
The playtesting took about 3-4 months I'd say. Maybe longer, I can't remember exactly. It sure felt like ages.

Buttons[edit | edit source]

Please note that even though the original images are of high quality, due to licensing these have been shrunk until the resolution is so low to make printing of the images nonviable, but allowing some finer detail to come through compared to the Button Men Online 150px images.