Game on! A look into the rise of design-led board games

The year is 2011. Prince William and Kate just got married. LMFAO is Sorry for Party Rocking. People are protesting down on Wall Street. And your friend keeps trying to get you to come over and play this new game called Cards Against Humanity. Fast forward 13 years, and Cards Against Humanity has become inescapable (and controversial), inspiring a flood of similar card games with bold sans-serif typography because, much like film and literature, tabletop gaming is ruthlessly trend driven.

The past decade has seen a rush to fulfill the demand of a booming industry – tabletop gaming has become a $27 billion industry, a figure that’s expected to nearly double by 2029. While increased demand has led to copycats, it has also meant there’s never been more opportunity for new game publishers to enter the industry and experiment. It makes sense that the visual and tactical format of board games would attract graphic designers, but simply having good taste in typography and layout isn’t enough to make a successful game. Great games can exist with hardly any visual design at all; Dungeons & Dragons, one of the most iconic tabletop games of all time, can be played with dice and handwritten numbers on paper. So what do designers bring to the tabletop? Graphic design can make a game more playable and beautiful, but it can also get in the way.

Designers who’ve branched into tabletop game design are often driven by the unique challenge of balancing visual design and game mechanics. For the team at Itten, a tabletop publisher based in Japan, design serves two functions. “One is the artistic aspect, which enhances the theme and enjoyment of the game,” says Naotaka Shimamoto, director at Itten. “The other is the graphical user interface, making it easier to play.”

Aside from harsh criticism, graphic designers entering the tabletop game business may need to prepare for confusion. When Weast Coast launched their hugely successful Kickstarter for Snakes of Wrath, the popular tabletop game review site The Dice Tower didn’t quite know what to make of it. “They were like, ‘What’s going on with this? Why is it making so much money?’” says Dan Cassaro, partner of Young Jerks and one of three founders of Weast Coast. Much like CMYK’s Wavelength, Snakes of Wrath is a visual departure from the classic gaming zeitgeist. With its Edwardian-inspired typography and bold serpentine iconography, the game would feel at home on the set of a Hercule Poirot film adaptation – perhaps played in a steamship lounge as the detective and his party sail down the Nile. Dan adds: “They were confused and like… a little mad.”

A game like Snakes of Wrath may attract non-gamers with visual acuity, but for many in the tabletop gaming community, they see high quality visuals as a signal that the game could be all flash and no substance. For Dan, it’s understandable. “There’s this distrust that can come up when something feels too slick,” he says. “It can feel disingenuous in some way.” The Weast Coast team prioritises making the kind of games they want to play without getting hung up on targeting an audience and making them happy. “I wish we were that thoughtful about it,” laughs Dan. “We have an aesthetic target we’re trying to hit but not in terms of like necessarily who we're trying to sell to. We want to make beautiful games, we don't want them to be full of junk. And we would like them to not have a ton of single-use plastic.”

Then, there’s playtesting feedback, which might be outside of a graphic designer’s comfort zone. Tokyo Highway, one of Itten’s most popular games, encourages players to stack and arrange game pieces to simulate the often chaotic design of urban roadways. When small sections of the highway collapse, players have the option to repair the highway and continue the game – but many found this too difficult. The Itten team had to take a new approach. “We redesigned our cars which were originally made out of wood to a new rubber material,” says Naotaka Shimamoto. “We also adjusted the roads by adding rubber pads underneath them to allow for more grip, which helped improve the game.” While this rubber padding certainly wasn’t part of the Itten team’s original vision for Tokyo Highway’s visual design, designers have to be prepared to compromise their original vision in favor of playability.

For designers entering the tabletop gaming space, most established publishers will tell you to prepare for a learning curve. The visuals may come naturally, but other parts of the process require research and trial-and-error. Of the many things they’d do differently, the Weast Coast team wouldn’t have started their company with what Dan describes as “the most expensive game in the world”, with 90 full-colour, double-sided bakelite tiles. But had he known better, Dan and his team likely wouldn’t have published Snakes of Wrath and never discovered their love for publishing games. “For many creative pursuits, you can intuit your way through them,” says Dan. “Writing rule books, for example, was not one of those things. I had to do my homework and read a thousand rule books from games that had a similar weight of complexity and style.”

Even if the gaming audience for your design aesthetic doesn’t seem apparent when you start, it may grow with you. “When we first designed Tokyo Highway, the board gaming community was just starting to go through a sudden growth,” says Naotaka Shimamoto. “Now, in Japan, board games have become widely known to non-gamers and have established themselves as a cultural category.”

Ultimately, a love of graphic design can take you a long way, but it can’t be your only value proposition. As CMYK continues to experiment with visual design and mechanics, Alex encourages designers to remember that while, on the outside, games are “a wrapper of fun,” they are very technical products. “Any designer can make something look cool,” says Alex. “But if it doesn’t deliver a great experience, it’ll spend its life unplayed on the shelf until you dump it on the sidewalk before you move apartments.” To avoid such a fate, to Alex, it’s very simple: “Start from a love of games rather than wanting to make a visual curiosity.”