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!)

For about a year, I was working on the board game Cloudspire at work. It’s complete, and the staff just got their copies recently! Not only is this the first big game that I’ve worked on with the company, it’s also the first game where I’ve been involved right at the beginning. It has been a good learning project and a lot of fun! And to date, it’s my best work yet!

It was a completely different experience to be involved in the game from the very beginning. When I worked on Too Many Bones, there was already a design aesthetic set up, and I had to make sure that everything I did matched up with what was already in place. With Cloudspire, I had a part in shaping how the game would end up looking, which was very rewarding, but also very challenging.

The most difficult part is getting everything to fit on a chip and be legible. Every chip has at least nine different pieces of information on it. And because the main artist, Anthony LeTourneau does such a great job on the art, we try our best to keep it as large as it can possibly be. But since playing the game is the most important part, every symbol and piece of game information needs to also be clear and legible.

This was also the first project that I managed multiple artists. In addition to Anthony, we also had Jared Blando working on all of the neoprene hex art. His art is beautiful and bright and vibrant. The biggest challenge was making sure that both of the artists’ work looked coherent and seamlessly fit together. Since their styles are different, it was not the easiest task. But I think it also helped that the only place where their art was merged was on the neoprene fortresses.

My favorite pieces are the covers for the solo and cooperative scenario books. They were some of the last designs that I did for the game, and I love how the scratches worked with the background art. It added a grunge that gives you an idea of what is back there, but really calls more attention to the art and makes it stand out. The only thing that makes me sad is that the covers were printed so dark. (You can’t tell this in the photos because I lightened them to look as I had intended.)

I liked the cover art so much, that I used the same effects when I designed the booth panels. (I’ll write a separate design post for that at another time.)

This was by far the most difficult game for me to photograph. There are so many pieces to the game, I couldn’t get a photo of everything without the edges of my photo setup showing up (which is why I have a lot of detail shots below). Plus, we went with a matte finish on the chips this time, which is absolutely beautiful, but has to be photographed at specific angles in order to not cause a huge glare!

Now the only thing left is for me to learn how to play the game! We were so busy putting together all of the content that went into this game, that I never had a chance to playtest. And since I’ll be explaining the game at Essen this year, it would be helpful to know the intricacies of it!

When I first started working at Chip Theory Games this year, the Waterlogged Book was the first big design project I was tasked with. This is a book that accompanies our newer game, Undertow. It’s a collection of stories and artwork that go with the game and can be purchased additionally.

Before I started working on designing the pages, I was tasked with reading the Liberation Logbook, which was the accompanying book to the first game in the series, Too Many Bones. The Liberation Logbook is really amazing! It is a leather-bound book that has a design burned into the leather cover. It also has pages that have been burned in the book. Seriously! The company that printed and bound the books took a blow torch to the pages to singe them! How cool is that?! And because every page burned differently, every book is unique.

So I had some really intimidating shoes to fill! This book had to be as cool, if not cooler than the previous book (which in a way would be easier, since this book wouldn’t be getting burned…ha!) The leather bound part of the Waterlogged Book was already decided, as well as the format of the book (the sections and a general idea of where some of the artwork had to go in the sections), and we wanted the book to not look so completely different from the first book that it didn’t look like it could have come from the same world.

The first part that I started designing was the background of the pages. I used the same background as the previous book, but I added water pools and drip spots to the pages. I also darkened the page on the edges, which didn’t have to be done to the previous book, since it literally had its pages burned.

Then I moved on to the text and artwork. The headers were really fun to create! After that, I got to read through the stories and search through all of the art from the artist, Anthony LeTourneau, and add things in the book where pictures would seem to make sense. The book is supposed to be like a journal of the Gearloc’s (Too Many Bones characters) journey as they float on a raft down the river. It was so much fun looking through all the art to decide what to use. Anthony is such a talented artist, and he had done so much amazing stuff! My favorites were the tentacle drawings and the pair on the raft at the end of the Kickstarter story portion. When I found the tentacle art, I didn’t think it was being used in the game, but I loved it so much, that I had to add it to the book. It turns out that the tentacles are a part of the Tyrant that is making its debut in this game, so it worked out perfectly!

I also should talk about the prepress snafu that I encountered for this book. Even though my font was embedded, when we sent the book to be printed, our first draft came back with the font looking ok, but all of the ligatures were missing. So the word “first,” would be missing the “fi” and printed only as “rst.” It was very frustrating, since I missed it when I was checking the book. The images looked good, and the text was there, so I was ready to say ok to the entire project. Luckily, Josh had actually read some of the book, and he noticed it right away. (Definitely not my finest proofing moment…) I’m not sure what would cause this to happen when the font is embedded, but now I know that I absolutely need to create outlines before I send out my PDFs for printing. I never ran across that when I worked in prepress. I only saw font problems if the font wasn’t properly embedded, so this was a new one. So for any of you who are sending files out, make sure you do this as well. Or at least make sure to check all of your ligatures, since they can be easy to miss!

I recently worked on a logo design for a board game. I’m not sure if it’s actually going to be a board game or if it was just a concept for a competition. I didn’t win the competition, but I loved the logo that I came up with. I had originally designed the logo to be a square, but since most board game boxes have smaller sides, I changed it to a landscape version so it would fit on the side of the box and be able to be larger.

I think I am so in love with this logo because it’s cartoony, but sophisticated. Back in elementary school, I had gotten a How to Draw Animals book, and I think my go-to is to draw my super cartoony version of what I learned way back then. For this logo, rather than rely on my long-ago-learned-skills, I looked at other logos using pigs and photos of actual pigs. My original plan was to make it more of a flat design with basic shadows. My husband suggested that I should add a texture to give it a more papercraft feel. Because I was running out of time, I quickly added a crumpled up sheet to give it some texture. If I had more time, I would have gone with a more subtle texture and maybe used a different texture for each piece of the logo, not just over the top of the entire logo. But either way, I’m still really pleased with how this turned out!