Client: Alderac Entertainment Group
Project Scope: Player boards, punchboards for tokens, token design.
Project Description: A Euro-style auction game about dominating trade in a Restoration Era city.
For this project, I designed the appearance of the game’s boards and tokens.
When I came on board this project, the cards and icons for the commodities had already been designed. My first task was to create a central market board for all goods in the game. For this, instead of stalls and buildings (which was a look for a game that eventually was put on hold), I went with a manifest of goods that would be coming off the boats. (Later, I discovered the artwork for the box cover featured a dockmaster and several buyers reading sheets like the ones on the market board, which I believe was based on my board designs.) This market board was to be extended by a turn track, which would change based on the number of players. This turn track board was designed to fit exactly under the market board: coins and paper on the market board extended onto the turn track. An additional bit of coding for these boards had the number of coins near the bottom of the board match the number of players. Right next to where it says “5 players”? Five coins.
For the punchboards, I had to consider how to keep the number of dies for the game as low as possible and have the design of the punchboards be pleasing when unboxing the game. The version of the game turned in to AEG had only two dies needed for the punchboards.
