Welcome to Arkadia: Could a Dartmouth artist's card game be the next Pokémon?

DARTMOUTH — By day, he's an assistant manager at a local retailer. By night — and often well into the following morning — Dartmouth resident and UMass Dartmouth art grad Brian Fournier is up chipping away at a creative passion project he's been thinking about since childhood.

"It's... it's kind of like Pokémon, Yuh-Gi-Oh! and chess at the same time," Fournier said as he tried to describe the concept of Arkadia, the collectible card game he has dedicated much of his free time to creating for a number of years now.

"I'm going to put this here," said Fournier's cousin Stephanie Davison as she put down a card representing a character called Torpedo Shark — a robotic-looking shark with a yellow glow emitting from its mouth. With Torpedo Shark in play, Davison then took a red die and placed it on a checker/chess-style game board. The number facing up helped her identify that particular die — one of several of hers on the board — as the one representing Torpedo Shark.

"I don't know if this is smart but... I'm gonna hit you," Davison said as she slid the die a few spots over and onward toward Fournier's end of the board in accordance with Torpedo Shark's movement abilities, which are spelled out on the slickly produced game card. By the end of the movement, Davison's red die had landed alongside one of Fournier's blue die representing a character he had in play, and the signature attack of Davison's choosing commenced. After following up with a second attack — a special ability granted to her at the time by another card in her hand — Davison succeeded in reducing Fournier's fighting force by one.

"He's dead," Fournier said, moving his blue die off the board.

"Woo-hoo!" Davison responded.

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Davison, who grew up drawing and playing pretend with Fournier when they were children, is able to provide feedback on the game as an experienced collectible card game player, being a fan of one of the old classics, Magic: The Gathering. "I like it a lot," Davison said after wrapping up the Arkadia session with Fournier. "I play Magic and it's very similar where you're reading the cards to understand what you're doing, and then there are phases to the turns."

All fun and games

Fournier, 30, said Arkadia's roots reach back into his childhood growing up in New Hampshire and visiting SouthCoast on the weekends.

"When I was like 15, I ended up making a card game the kids in the neighborhood and I would play," he said, noting having grown up a fan of the Pokémon and Yu Gi Oh! franchises, with their Japanese manga-style art — sometimes referred to as "anime" — and associated card games. "I was taking the white cardboard backings that they sometimes use to protect comic books, and I would take a Yu-Gi-Oh! card, trace it, then use a ruler to draw lines and create kind of a card template that I could fill in however I wanted.

"By the time I came back to Massachusetts from New Hampshire, I kind of had a whole deck that we could play with."

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After graduating high school, Fournier moved to SouthCoast and began working in retail, eventually attending Bristol Community College and finishing up his illustration degree at UMass Dartmouth. While a lot of life had happened between the days of makeshift card games and being a college student, an assignment one day resurrected the idea.

"I think it was my junior year at UMass when we were looking at this huge painting. It had a lot going on, and the directive was basically to pick out one of the characters in it and make a narrative about them, then create something based on that," Fournier said. "I ended up noticing this guy who was in an alleyway dropping a deck of blackjack cards, so that's what prompted me to think about cards, and then it made me think back to those memories growing up."

After producing designs for three game cards to satisfy the requirements of the project, Fournier's imagination started running wild with more ideas for characters and cards that would make up a full deck. The designs would be done in a style similar to the Japanese manga franchises that introduced him to the world of collectible card ga growing up. "It pretty much took me looking back to all the stuff I liked as a kid, and then the layout for it and everything just kind of fell together," he said.

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'There's always another thing...'

After spending the rest of that year toying with the idea of a complete product, a certain event suddenly gave Fournier the time to take his creative endeavor to the next level.

"When the pandemic started, I was single, I had a lot of alone time, so I started investing more and more time into it," Fournier said. "It was like one of those things where I was like, should I just do this? Because it was going to keep ringing in my head."

While he's no longer single, Fournier says he's still just as committed to completing the project, and as of last July, hit a milestone that should mean he's now in the homestretch to having a finalized version of Arkadia in hand — but it's difficult to tell how close he actually is. "As of last July I pretty much redid everything and got to a finished product. But even after that it's like, there's always another thing to think about."

Much of the ongoing work has been tweaking the rules of the game, a process that has involved gameplay run-throughs to expose needed improvements, Fournier said. "My buddy Tyler is someone I've played with a handful of times and I'll have him critique me and tell me anything he doesn't like, then I'll adjust things and we'll see how that plays out."

For example, Fournier says a certain character, Needle Bomb, will have his capabilities scaled back by the time the game is unveiled for purchase. "He has to get fixed because he can literally go across the whole board and blow up so that's one of the biggest issues," Fournier said. "Someone could be like 'oh, I've got this card,' and boom, just win the game."

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Down to business

Minor tweaks aside, Fournier says the bulk of the work ahead now consists of writing and designing an instruction manual. Being a visual storyteller, naturally, Fournier says, he wants to present the manual in a creative way that adds to the narrative around the game and its characters. "I work on storyboards with the characters sometimes so I wanted to try to make an instruction manual that's a comic, but explains how the game works at the same time."

On the business side of things, Fournier says he has already been putting in the footwork to gain some contacts, and hopes to have a complete package to present to them and others by mid-summer.

"I have a cousin who was kind of a business advisor to Funko so I've been showing him stuff as I've been going along and once I have a finished product I'll probably send them that," Fournier said. "Besides that it's been going to local card and game shops and stuff, trying to find places I'll be able to set up a table and teach people how to play and build a following."

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While it's long been his main creative focus, Fournier says Arkadia isn't all he has going on when it comes to art, sometimes taking on T-shirt design jobs for screen printing clients and working on individual pieces like those that can be seen on the walls of his South Dartmouth home. And while Fournier is cautiously optimistic about the chances of Arkadia's success, he says he accepts the possibility it won't take off the way he hopes despite all the time, money and thought invested.

"The more I talk to people, the more I realize there's so many other people doing the same thing," he said. "At the end of the day, even if it just ends up being a portfolio thing, I guess it shows that I can commit through to the end of a project — that was kind of the initial idea anyway.

"But then it's like, why not try to sell it?"

This article originally appeared on Standard-Times: Dartmouth artist creates Pokemon-like card game called Arkadia