When I acquired the rights to El Dorado Canyon for KingMe Game Vault, one of my main goals for the 2nd Edition was a complete, ground-up art overhaul. Chief among the components needing visual reinvention were the Character Cards. The 1st Edition featured simple, playful silhouettes of meeple-shaped figures. That worked well enough to set the original game’s lighthearted tone, but for the 2nd Edition, I wanted grittier, more grounded, and realistic frontier art.
Commissioning new art meant making deliberate decisions about who would inhabit these cards. I believe the stories I tell should reflect the richness and complexity of the world. I am committed to an inclusive development process, making sure every character is depicted with authenticity and care. Popular western tropes often minimize the diversity of the American West, presenting it as monolithic. In reality, the 19th-century frontier was a dynamic, multicultural crossroads shaped by Native American, African American, Latine, and Asian American people.
The First Design Trap: Flawed Archetypes
I quickly ran into a major design trap. Like many games, I inherited a structure that coded specific professions using dated archetypes. Simply slotting a diverse cast into the existing 1st Edition alignment system (where roles like “Bandit” or “Graverobber” were inherently categorized as “Bad”) relied on implicit bias. I had to pause. I was creating a real risk of reinforcing negative stereotypes, and that was completely unacceptable. I could not just “diversify” the cast without first dismantling the flawed mechanics that created those archetypes in the first place.
My initial idea was historical grounding: what if I based each character on a real historical figure? By anchoring the cast in actual frontier history, I hoped to intentionally represent real individuals across the board. To move away from moral labeling, I first experimented with replacing “Good” and “Bad” with “Lawful” and “Outlaw.” The thinking was that “Lawful” characters operated within established institutional structures, while “Outlaws” operated outside them.
I spent a lot of development time exploring this path. But I soon hit a wall: I was trying to force real, complex human lives into a rigid binary game system. Using historical figures inevitably imported historical baggage that a streamlined card game could not, and should not, attempt to arbitrate.
The realization was clear: the moment my design process required debating the morality of a real person to justify their role in the game, I was no longer designing a game-first experience. I walked away from that approach not to avoid diverse representation, but because I refused to reduce real people to placeholders for rigid game mechanics.
The Case of Samuel Sixkiller
A clear example of this challenge was Samuel Sixkiller. On paper, he seemed like an ideal candidate for a “Lawful” Native American archetype. He served as High Sheriff of the Cherokee Nation, an agent for the Missouri-Pacific Railroad, and the first Captain of the United States Indian Police. Within a traditional, Euro-centric Western narrative, he was unambiguously on the side of “the Law.”
Yet his historical legacy is far more complex. He operated within a federal system that was actively and systematically disenfranchising Indigenous peoples. As a designer, flattening that profound historical reality into a convenient “Lawful” game mechanic felt wrong. Doing so would strip away the nuance of his lived experience, compressing a real person into an oversimplified box.
The Root Cause: A Game About Gangs
So I took a step back and looked at the core premise of El Dorado Canyon. Players do not represent heroes or noble pioneers. Each player leads a cutthroat crew using violence, greed, and theft to amass Gold and Dread. In that context, labels like “Good” and “Lawful” made no sense at all.
Why did moral alignments exist in the game to begin with? Mechanically, certain character abilities triggered based on the alignment of an eliminated opponent. By reimagining the alignment system, I could eliminate moral alignments entirely and rebuild the characters around functional, morally ambiguous frontier archetypes.
From Alignments to Factions: Gold & Lead
If alignments were just mechanical designations, what I really needed were thematic factions instead of moral judgments. I explored several alternatives (Townspeople vs. Frontierspeople, Gilded vs. Dusted, Badges vs. Bandanas) before landing on the two currencies that actually drive the game: Gold and Lead.
In El Dorado Canyon, players chase wealth and dread. Gold represents greed, commerce, and economic leverage; Lead represents firepower, force, and direct confrontation. Having money does not make someone good or bad, and using a gun does not make someone good or bad either. Both factions simply reflect ruthless frontier survival.
Next, I overhauled the character titles. Decades of media have conditioned people to associate badges with virtue and outlaws with vice. To break those associations, institutional figures like Marshals and outright criminals like Bandits were out. Instead, I focused on trade- and role-based titles:
1st Edition Character / Original Alignment / 2nd Edition Character / New Faction
Banker / Good / Banker / Gold
Opportunist / Bad / Claim Jumper / Gold
Prospector / Good / Prospector / Gold
Legend / Good / Apothecary / Gold
Gambler / Bad / Speculator / Gold
Graverobber / Bad / Undertaker / Gold
Hired Gun / Good / Bounty Hunter / Lead
Villain / Bad / Gunslinger / Lead
Bandito / Bad / Hired Gun / Lead
Coward / Bad / Maverick / Lead
Lawman / Good / Trail Boss / Lead
Gunman / Good / Veteran / Lead
Every character operates in the gray. A Claim Jumper is ruthless, but driven by economic opportunism; a Veteran survived service to pursue their own ends; an Undertaker honors the dead while overcharging the living; and an Apothecary practices practical, unregulated medicine. The designations convey their methods, not a moral judgment.
Moving Forward: The Real Work Ahead
Stripping away rigid moral alignments and legacy archetypes solved the mechanical problem. Every character in El Dorado Canyon is now morally ambiguous: rough, opportunistic boomtown figures who achieve their ends through money or guns.
However, mechanical ambiguity does not automatically prevent cultural insensitivity. The real challenge lies at the intersection of three elements: the archetype, the casting, and the visual art. If any of those three are mismatched or handled carelessly, the character collapses straight back into a harmful trope. Renaming a card means nothing if the person placed in that role, or the way they are visually depicted, reinforces old caricatures.
When casting this roster across Native American, Asian American, African American, and Latine backgrounds, I have to be deliberate about who goes where, why they are there, and what visual cues accompany them. Removing “Good” and “Bad” did not finish the job; it simply cleared the board so I could do this work responsibly. The next milestone is working closely with an artist on character concepting: pairing thoughtful casting with historically authentic, respectful art that gives every character presence and grit, without falling into lazy visual clichés.
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