Side project: Cube Libre board
Last year, I started to learn Lua and Love 2D, an ongoing thing. This year, in a similar spirit of dipping my toes into areas adjacent to by day to day work I'm planning to spend some time getting a bit of a foothold in the graphic design of board games (as a mark of commitment I splashed out on an absurdly expensive book). Starting from a place I'm reasonably comfortable (maps) my first project is redesigning the board for GMT's Cuba Libre. Here's the brief:
- Make it look more like something "of the time". The game's setting is Cuba in the late 50s but the existing board doesn't really speak to this except in the use of photography on the cards, I want it to feel a bit like an artefact of the games milieu.
- You don't have to follow COIN/ GMT conventions. A lot of the information design of the existing board is there to provide a framework for people already familiar with the conventions of GMT wargames and specifically other games in the COIN (counterinsurgency) series. This isn't me so it just feels like a lot of visual clutter.
- Prioritise play above teaching and setup. The existing board has a bunch of iconography that relates to the boards initial setup assume that the players can get this information elsewhere
- If necessary label features directly rather than using a key
- Avoid overloading information design elements. Let's not use a single track for ALL numerical values.
So anyway, it's been interesting so far figuring out the print stuff. I got some feedback to an early draft from the BBG Cuba Libre forums but the board game art & design forum on BGG was frustratingly silent
Anyway, here's the current state:
Still to do:
- A proper test print I taped together a set of A4 laser prints (see below) which was helpful for scale etc. but I do need to see how the colours actually come out and try a game on the new one before I'm happy (RE. the vagaries of printing in general, I feel I'm just reaching the point where I understand my level of ignorance).
- Better icons
- Individual player boards ( & reference cards?)
- Image processing. I want the map layer to look like art was actually printed fun the 50s so I want to experiment with filters to achieve that
- Illustrations (street maps?) for the enlarged cities & economic centres.
