Brief

Project Type: Board Game Design ● Graphic Design ● Illustration

This was my capstone project for my senior year in college. I wanted to create a project that would allow me explore ideas of interactivity in a physical form. Guided by my long time love of board games, I decided to design and create a board game that would engage with themes of sustainability in a fun and visually interesting way.

The Product

I full designed and created the board game: Overhaul. Overhaul is a board game where players compete to rebuild a civilization after environmental collapse destroys the planet. They have to gather resources, play action cards, and negotiate with other players all to create a civilization while maintaining sustainability.

The Process

Game Ideation

When I started this project, I knew I wanted to make a board game that focused on themes of sustainability. However, the first step I needed to take was a lot of brainstorming about what form that game would take exactly. I started by putting out a lot of loose ideas about what the game would be and what I would need to create to make it a reality and gradually refining those ideas down.

Visual Ideation

After I started to narrow down what the game would be, I could begin working on how the game would look. This started with a ton of exploration into visual styles, moodboards, color, and type. I worked through a lot of options to find the best visual style for the game to convey its mood, aesthetic, and purpose in an engaging and visually interesting way.

Brand Development

Now it was time to settle on a name and logo. I worked through a ton of different names before settling on Overhaul. I also worked through a lot of logo variations until I found one that fit in with the visual style of the game and linked to its underlying message of replacing things with something better.

Designing Each Piece

Now that I knew the direction the game was going in, I needed to go through and design each piece that was needed. In my process for designing the pieces, I sketched both on paper and digitally to be able to work through many ideas for each piece’s look. Here was my sketching process for the resource cards as an example of what that looked like:

Final Product

All of this work came together to create a one of a kind board game: Overhaul.