About three years ago, Nick and I were inspired by a fan-made board redesign for the game Manhattan, and we decided we wanted to update our copy. The game is so much fun, but the graphic design reminds me of when I was first in school and learned about Photoshop’s filters! No offense to the graphic designer, but it’s really bad. It was also designed in the 90s, so I’m sure it seemed really great back then. But now it just looks super dated.

Our original plan was that we would use the fan-made board and just make our own cards. We wanted to use Game Crafters to print everything, and the board wasn’t set up in their standard size. The fan-made board was a rectangle with a map of Manhattan in the background, and the Game Crafters boards were square, which was not going to work. But no worries! We can design a board as well!

We started our redesign with inspiration of subway stations and graffiti art. Our plan was to make the different card-types each look like a prominent Manhattan station and have a different graffiti style. Shortly after starting this redesign, I got hired at Chip Theory Games. For me, the pressure was on. I now worked at a board game company, so the five people who would come to our house and ever see this would obviously expect something amazing. And I would give them something amazing!

I won’t go into the details of how long I spent perfecting each subway tile or all the disagreements that Nick and I had about how long this project should take. I put the pressure on myself, and I took it to the extreme. The worst part is that I knew better. I knew that all the details I was making looked great on the screen, but were too small to print. But it took me way too long to finally print it out and see what a dumbass I was being!

After I had my realization, we decided it would be best to take a break from the game. In the meantime, an announcement of a redesign came out. Which made our break seem good, since we could buy the new version and just move on with life. But we were disappointed with the redesign when we finally saw it. Not because it’s not a good design. More because we had this idea in our heads of what we wanted the art to look like, and this was different. We decided that our redesign was back on!

Nick had the really good idea of having a Design Jam. We gave ourselves 8 hours to figure out and finalize all the design. The only things we were allowed to do after that 8 hours was prepress work to get the files ready for printing. And if we got to the eighth hour and still had work to do, then we were done. We would either buy the new version or just deal with our old version.

The first thing we did was to dig into all of our previous work. It was surprising to see that there was some good stuff in there! We weren’t completely starting from scratch. Looking at the design with fresh eyes, we noticed that while our card idea had the ability to look really cool, it was going to be a lot of work and was also a different style from the rest of the game. But we loved the board! So we decided to minimalize the cards more and match them to the board. 8 hours later, we were done and had a game to send off to the printer!

I’m really pleased with how everything turned out! And now we have a game we enjoy with our own design! And I learned to not focus so much on the details, until it’s time to focus on the details! (Well, hopefully I learned that!)