Art director and graphic designer for board games, card games, and tabletop hobby products.
Hi all! Following up my earlier post about analyzing the unique aspects of the Mirror Deck, I promised a trick-taking game using the deck. Here it is! -~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~-~- Zoomies A trick-taking game for the Mirror Deck. You are cats wildly climbing up and down. The player with the most points gets in trouble for breaking the furniture. The player with second-most points at the end of the game…
It's been a few years since I created the Mirror Deck and posted it on DriveThruCards . As a reminder, it's a deck of cards numbered 1 through 99, where each number can have its digits transposed, so the deck is only 54 cards. I asked some advice from other game designers recently on where to take the deck next. James Ernest was especially helpful, recommending that I look for any rarities or…
These components go by many names in the industry — Chipboard, Punchout, Punch Sheets, or Cardboard — but I typically just say “punch board” out of habit. They all refer to thick cardboard pressed between two glossy color laminate sheets on either side. A factory can create custom dies that perforate these sheets into different patterns, then the resulting tokens can be punched out of the sheet.…
After legendary designer Sid Sackson passed, the Strong Museum of Play became the home of his personal papers. This collection includes correspondences, journals, prototypes, sketches, and a bunch more ephemera from his long career. His diaries alone spanned 35 years and were intricately indexed. It will take years to transcribe and digitize them all, but the early parts of his career are up on…
Good news! I've submitted the final draft of my book "Graphic Design for Board Games" to the publisher! Of course that now leaves a void in my schedule for some other long-term project. I'm not yet certain what that would be, so for now I'll continue sharing early drafts and previews of what I've written for the book. The following section comes from the chapter on designing language-neutral…
This is an excerpt from the rough draft of my book Graphic Design for Board Games. If you want early sneak peeks at the rest of the draft, including editorial comments and discussion, head over to my patreon ! Three Principles of Card Design I spend most of this chapter getting in the weeds of print production and manufacturing. That’s just where I spent most of my time in my career, so that’s…
I've got the rights to Trickster back in my hands! I'm considering where its future may lead. Trickster was my first attempt at really pushing print-on-demand as a primary distributor. It was an ambitious plan back in 2015. In those days, it was a series of individual small-deck card games. The deck sizes were optimized for best margins and ease of shipping from POD. Each deck was standalone, but…
(This is a rough sketch of a game from 2017, when dice placement and roll-and-writes were gaining more popularity. I was in a phase where I was just merging as many different ingredients together to see if they'd stick. You can see some of these ideas in Pencil Park.) You’re trying to get your payloads onto rockets and into orbit. Rocket space ain’t cheap and neither is the fuel. You have to…
It's the annual recap episode of the Ludology podcast. Important notes on imposter syndrome here. Host Erica Bouyouris is the designer of "Dumb Ways To Die," the best-selling new card game of the year. That should be a huge achievement for any game designer. Unfortunately, that doesn't align with BoardGameGeek buzz or lead to big awards, so she's had to come to terms with that as she continues in…
Here are all the books I've read and reviewed over the past year. As is typical of my lifestyle, I take in more audiobooks than physical books. I'm not a purist about that sort of thing. The one hitch is that I've already burned through a LOT of the audiobooks from the library that had my interest. It's forced me to branch out to other genres, so you'll see some more non-fiction and a couple of…
I often rely on set collection for my early prototypes. It's such a simple, satisfying framework to motivate players and give clear goals. The problem is how often set collection becomes a rote, emotionless task list to complete. The theme of the set collection is what set makes it more appealing to new players. An evocative theme suggests secondary mechanisms that help fill out the rest of the…
This is extremely important: What you draw today is what you'll be hired for tomorrow. If you draw spaceships, you'll show up on searches for spaceships. If you draw dragons, you'll be sorted with the dragons. If you don't want to draw spaceships or dragons, don't post them in your portfolio. As an art director, I have to search through hundreds of portfolios for each project, looking for the…
First of all, never work (for someone else) for free! I'll break those four ideas down below, but just remember that only you can determine what your time is worth. You can always go lower, but it's hard to go higher. I recommend starting high. Never accept the feeling of being underpaid for your time and skill. You'll be surprised how quickly you can fall out of love with art. That said, both of…
Photo of two tokens. One with a one and one with a seven but they look almost identical making it hard to differentiate. ( Source ) Some typefaces don’t have enough distinguishing features between their 7 and 1. The usual culprits are sans serif, modernist, or futuristic fonts that have removed so many distinctive features of their characters that they become indiscernible from each other. You may…
As a little weekend hobby project, I was thinking about how some of the concepts and visual language of Marvel SNAP would translate into a printed card. Very quickly, this spun out into its own concept. I imagined the cost and strength would both have to be locked to the top left for ease of reference. I minimized the cost icon to be less prominent since you'd rarely have to look at it while it's…
I'm working on a card design that has multiple variables within the same text field. Each variable is its own paragraph with its own Paragraph Style. It's rare that every card has content for each variable ABC though. Usually it's a mix, like AC, AB, or BC. The issue is that when you delete empty lines, sometimes the remaining paragraph gets re-assigned the deleted paragraph's style. Compound this…
Howdy folks! Big news announced yesterday from Renegade! There will be a new edition coming with new content, some rebalanced ship powers, bigger ship meeples, and all in a proper box! From the publisher: https://renegadegamestudios.com/junk-orbit/ New Features! New box! Now in a standard box with a fitted plastic tray for tile storage! Solo mode included! 2 mini expansions included! The Mission…
Cleaning out some old office furniture, I stumbled across a cache of vintage game books I purchased from Dickson Street Books many years ago. Among the collection is this well-loved 1977 edition of Beyond Words by Sid Sackson, the legendary designer of Acquire and Can't Stop. This was the third in his series of "Beyond" game books, the first two being Beyond Tic Tac Toe and Beyond Solitaire . This…
The new #HeroClix card format is now public! The main goal was to bring more attention to the sculpt, not having it cropped to a little bust on the corner. That dominoed into a few other measures to conserve space, compress reference information, and generally make the game easier to approach. I learned a lot! While I'm happy with this first wave, the future waves look even better now that the…
I'm trying to make it standard that punchboard sheets label the components in the negative space between die cuts. My hope is that this helps the customer during the unboxing process as they're sorting out their bits. I know it might seem redundant if they're also looking at the rulebook as an inventory list, but I'm always trying to find ways to improve the customer experience. Sometimes that…
New video! Here's a simple trick I've used for years to make a better drop shadow than the default shadow you get from layer effects. Hope you find it useful!
Here are the two basic methods we've used for laying out diagrams in Components and Setup sections of our board game rulebooks. There are slight variations between these two extremes depending on the game, but generally they start with either of these two options. Combined This is one diagram showing a complete game setup. I use numbered tags to that correspond to each step of setup and lettered…
This is the story of how I tried to make a cool spatial auction mechanism into a complete game, but never quite found a concept that sold to a publisher. The last version was called OORT and the details are here: Theme Pitch: The Oort cloud is the last stop for a thousand light-years, so you better stock up! Dock your ships at the right stations to claim the best supplies and send their whole…
Like everyone else late last year, I got pretty hooked on Marvel SNAP. But enough ink has been spent praising the elegant gameplay, clever wagering strategies, and rather generous business model. I'd instead like to highlight the logos! The little names you see on every card in the game. Having worked on several Marvel card games in the past two years, I've certainly considered giving every card…
Planning an art budget for your board game? Here are average estimates I'm seeing lately, as of the end of 2022. But first, a caveat: Quotes vary by many factors, including but not limited to the following: Dimensions: The bigger the art, the more expensive it is. Medium: Traditional paints and inks cost more than digital. Style: The more you make an artist work outside their expertise, the more…