A Festa das Bruxas - Board Game
Back in 2015, before my graduation at the university, I had to create a final project to get my degree in the Design Program. I decided to work creating a board game. The project included a research about different board game styles: their mechanics, artwork, design, story and materials. After all the research, I had to design a real board game.
For this project, the game theme was based on a short tale from a local artist and poet: Franklin Cascaes. In Franklin's poems, he explored his imagination creating some stories about witches living in the city of Florianópolis. The stories full of magic, and creatures were located in this city that is known as a magic island - and despite that, the tale presented in the game is located in the mainland, in a mysterious beach with big stones over the shore.
The “Festa das Bruxas” means a Witch Party in Portuguese, the native language from this country.
Some of old stories tell that this party happened on this mysterious beach, full of witches and magic creatures.
But for this party, the witches did not invite the Devil!
What could happen about that?
As a form to make a link between my design knowledge, and a local poet, with his tale from the city where I am from I decided to create this game with all that backstory. I grew up near the mysterious beach from the tale, so it would be a wonderful way to make my last project at the university relating everything that was close to me.
For the mechanics, the game happens during the witch party. All players are witches, but one of the players is a gossip witch, the one who has to tell the Devil about the party. But nobody knows who the gossip witch is. The goal for all players is to enjoy the time at the party completing missions until the end of the party. If the party reaches its end, there is no time for the gossip witch to tell the Devil about the party. During the time, maybe the other witches can find if there is a gossip witch, and better yet, they can find out who is the gossiper.
The player who is the gossip witch needs to keep the secret about his or her identity, and also has to tell the Devil about the party. In the end there is a funny party with all missions completed, or the gossip witch tells the Devil about the party, and everybody is turned into stones.
As creative process for the game project, first a theory about design strategies were researched. After studying these strategies, they were applied creating the design and illustration artwork. All the materials, including, box, board, cards, tokens, logos, manual with the game rules, and other artworks were created digitally and printed later to present the game as a physical project.
