Secret Spells
Designing a board game
In January 2021, Great Family Board Games (GFBG), who I’d collaborated with on the Lockdown Board Game, approached me to design the assets for their new game for three to six year old’s; ‘Secret Spells’.
Designing all aspects of a board game is a fun challenge; there’s characters, rules, strategies and an overall theme to take into account; creating a coherent set of assets that work practically and also emphasise the fun and challenge of the game.
The game
The aim of the game is to collect several ingredients needed to cast a spell, making your way around the board to the central cauldron so you can cast your spell first – all while avoiding the lurking dangers of bats, spiders, and the dragon in his cave!
As with the previous board game design, I had to create several assets; from the game board itself which included characters like the dragon, owls and black cats, and story rooms like the dragon’s cave and potion room, as well as spell cards and ingredient cards, the game box and lid design.
Design development
I worked entirely digitally on this project, creating the game and its assets as vector graphics in Adobe Illustrator. I started by working on the cards and individual character designs, so that once those were approved by GFBG, I could roll out the styling and colouring more broadly across the game board and box as a whole.
I really enjoyed the challenge of bringing to life a slightly spooky story with dark and moody scenes, in a way that would be appealing and appropriate for young children; creating cheeky characters and using bright colours to capture their imagination and ensure the balance of the overall effect was playful.
Need help with a design or illustration job?
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