Graphic Design / Board Game, 2019

Project Description

MUSH is an original board game for families and young children featuring easy-to-learn gameplay, beautiful artwork, and endless combinations of event, item and dog cards to provide a brand new experience every time. Gather an assortment of fluffy puppies and equipment to have the best chance of winning the gold medal in this race across the world. Travel your dogsled team through vastly diverse environments from the frozen tundra of the Arctic to the baking sands of the Sahara, trying to outpace your opponents at every turn. It will take the perfect mix of strategy and chance to create a dog team worthy of victory, so harness up and get racing!

I helped create this game with a group of three other people as part of my Game Design class, and it was a blast. Essentially, players start the game by drawing three dog cards to make their sled team. Each round, players have the option to move on the board, draw more cards for specialized equipment/items, or trade out their dogs for better dogs. At the end of each round, an event card gets drawn, which affects some or all players for the following round. Players win the game when they are the first to make it to the finish tile.

The Process

After our first brainstorming session, we knew wanted to create some sort of dog-themed game for our final project, and eventually settled on dogsled racing as the primary idea. We decided to have different biomes that players can travel through (urban, forest, desert, water, and snow), which affect different dogs in different ways, forcing the player to strategize. For instance, some dogs (like Huskies) travel super slowly in the desert, whereas Chihuahuas are perfect for the desert environment and can travel very quickly. Since each player will be stuck in each biome for an extended amount of time and can only perform one action each turn, they will have to choose between drawing new dog cards (and potentially getting more appropriate dogs), drawing other cards to potentially get helpful items or equipment (for example, booties help you go faster in the snow environment), and just rolling to see if you can move ahead.

The game went through several different iterations of production and testing, all of which have been documented here. As we got farther along in the process, we realized there were many graphics to be generated for the board itself and all of the different cards, and I ended up being the primary graphic designer, which proved to be a great way to brush off my Adobe Illustrator skills. As can be seen below, we started off with a very rough paper game board and printer-paper cards with minimal decoration, because we wanted to prioritize the flow of the gameplay before getting bogged down in the aesthetic details. As we playtested the game with ourselves and others, we made tweaks to the mechanics and assets that slowly refined the player experience. Once we were confident in how the game felt to play, we got to work designing what everything would look like.

Throughout the design process, I knew that we were creating MUSH with a very specific audience in mind (families and young children), and we used this to guide all of our design decisions. I chose a font that was bubbly and fun, incorporated bright colors, and made images and icons a key part of the visual design. We wanted to make everything as simple and easy to understand as possible. For the actual game board, I ended up going to Goodwill and picking up a cheap copy of Pictionary to repurpose. After cutting the Pictionary board down to size and pasting the MUSH board onto it, our game was looking much more professional. We printed and cut out all of the different cards for items, events and equipment, and it was game time!