The Witches’ Road
BOARD GAME LAYOUT + ILLUSTRATION + PACKAGING
The Witches’ Road is one of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever worked on! Board game publisher Fiammingo Games trusted me to illustrate and design every component of this cozy, witchy board game.
This magical world of gentle witches includes tiles, cauldrons, magical ingredients, spellbooks, gardens, all brought to life with storybook illustrations. There’s so many little details that went into creating this artful board game.
More info at fiammingogames.com
The Game Board
The goal of The Witches’ Road is to move back in forth between two different towns while foraging ingredients, filling your spell book and infusing magic to improve the road and bring magic to the community.
The game board itself is incredibly detailed, and there’s so much to discover while you play. Each town is filled of tiny villagers and the magical forest is teeming with life. Unicorns, dragons and all kinds of cute little easter eggs are hidden among the trees and mushrooms.
Each segment of the road itself is a unique point of interaction. As the players improve the road, the road tiles are flipped revealing more powerful magical items and ingredients to pick up along the way!
Spells and Potions
One of the most important aspects of being a witch is casting spells, of course! In the Witches’ Road, players visit potion makers and libraries to gather potion recipes and pages for their spell books. For an extra special quest, the players may visit the two venerable witches who live in the heart of the forest.
Between the left and right spell book pages, potion recipes and venerable witch cards, The Witches’ Road required illustrating a wide range of card backs, icons and spells
Keeping these cards cohesive while still remaining distinct was a unique design challenge, but the end product is absolutely stunning.
Gardens and Critters
The gentle witches of this game are stewards of the forest and the magical creatures living within. As you make your way back and forth across the forest, you may gather garden cards to place on your player board. Once you obtain two matching halves of a particular garden type, you’ll have a perfect environment for the corresponding magical creature to inhabit!
The interaction between this series of components was the most challenging aspect of this game to design and illustrate. Once four unique habitats and creatures were developed, each garden illustration was split and combined with each other type.
That means there are sixteen unique garden cards that all SEAMLESSLY align with each other to create a single cohesive garden as long as the corresponding colors are adjacent. These garden cards then fit along the top of the player board and provide a home to the animal tiles that are placed on top.
Filling Your Cauldron
What do you do with all the different ingredients gathered along the witches’ road? Put them in your cauldron of course! Each witch gets a unique three-dimensional cauldron to store their potion ingredients.
This provides an extra challenge of course, since you can’t see what ingredients you have! When it’s time to brew a potion, you must remember which ones you’ve gathered or risk brewing a dud!
