by Anton Hallmann
"
The game is ugly as the night“ - said the first reviewer I saw about the new artwork. Well, that is a good start into writing a blog post about redesigning an existing game, I guess. So I prepared my next failure and started writing about the process.
Contrary to what some people think, a redesign isn't simply replacing old illustrations with prettier ones. If only it were that easy. Sometimes changing the artwork means changing almost everything around it, not only because the Game Designer did some adjustments to the game.
And to put an (obvious) disclaimer in front: By no means is the first edition design not good or even bad - in most cases we realize the things, which we could’ve done differently only when the product is released and used. (And don't even get me started about the two year gap between first touch and release and the urge of changing everything midway, which is like an itchy spot that you can't scratch.)
How I Blindly Said "Yes"Back in 2023 I sent my portfolio to a handful of board game publishers.
I feel most comfortable in illustrating for editorial, infographics and children's books. But board games had always fascinated me. They're one of the few creative fields where almost all my learned skills (from typography to composition) come to use - you design an entire object. Box art, rulebooks, player aids, cards, boards, icons, tokens... every single element has to work together. It's a designer's playground.
Fortunately, [user=Uli Blennemann]@UliBlennemann[/user] from Spielworxx got back to me.
The game?
Québec.My reaction? "...Sure!"
Nice, I got a commission, but unfortunately I had absolutely no idea what
Québec was about. Looking back, blindly agreeing before researching the project may not have been the most professional approach. On the other hand... I often receive inquiries about topics I know nothing about. Learning new things is always a pleasant side effect of the job.
First Things First: Learn the GameI already knew that the game was originally published in 2011 by le Scorpion Masqué and designed by [user=filou]Philippe Beaudoin[/user] and [user=Zendor]Pierre Poissant-Marquis[/user]. Since I didn't own a copy, I did what most people do these days. I looked for a playthrough.
Watching a game teaches you something that reading the rulebook never quite can. You don't just learn how the game works - you learn where players hesitate, where they get excited and which parts of the table naturally draw their attention. Plus I did not need to work myself through another rulebook.
I stumbled upon Heavy Cardboard's playthrough. This one stood out in particular, because both designers were present in the chat. A big advantage: Besides learning about the mechanics, I also learned something that immediately influenced the entire redesign: One of the designers is color-blind. That single piece of information completely changed how I approached the project.
Accessibility Isn't a FeatureIt's easy to think of accessibility as something you add at the end of a project. But, oh wonder, it isn't.
Good accessibility usually results in good graphic design.
If information is easier to distinguish, if important elements stand out naturally, if the interface does not cause any friction with the players to understand what's happening, everyone benefits - not just players with visual impairments.
Color blindness alone affects a lot of people. Roughly one in twelve men and one in two hundred women have some form of color vision deficiency, with red-green color blindness being by far the most common. (And that is a big chunk of gamers, too.)
Looking Through Different EyesAs a designer, I spend a lot of time choosing colors that look good together. I particularly love a limited color palette.
Québec one the other hand required lots of colors: 4 zones of power, backgrounds and 5 player colors. (which led to many iterations of color through the process) 🙃
Here's the original board viewed through the lens of red-green color blindness (deuteranopia).
Suddenly the political districts started melting into the background. Meanwhile, Religion and Culture - both relying on fairly similar shades of blue - become difficult to tell apart. None of this was intentional, of course. It's simply one of those things that's easy to miss unless you actively try to design for accessibility.
Fortunately, the solution wasn't particularly complicated, because the original board used a richly colored background underneath the hex tiles. Which was beautiful, but not very helpful for reading purposes.
Replacing it with a neutral, slightly aged parchment immediately allowed the colored hexes to stand out far more clearly. Instead of competing with the background, the hextiles became the focal point. As cheesy as it sounds, sometimes less is more and removing visual noise can be very helpful. Although I did not had the intention to trim it down to an excel sheet.
Then Came the Real PuzzleAccessibility via color was one issue, the other was the construction of the game board. Looking at you cascading mechanism.
It is the heart of the game and therefore should work as smoothly as possible. In the first edition the cascading zones of power were placed in the 4 corners of the board, which led to long distances between the cascading zones. So instead of spreading them into four corners, I brought them into a circle next to the central play area. Suddenly the cascade became much easier to follow. And the visual information of how many workers you have in one zone is in one space, a clear visual hierarchy, which reduces eye movement.
I had this change in mind from the beginning, it felt natural - which is usually a sign that it was the right decision. (But to be fair: I somehow thought "cascading" means going in a circle, oh boy.)
Part 2 - I Like Things In Order By this point, we had made the board easier to read and the cascading mechanism easier to follow. And one personal preference of mine: having as much content as possible on the game board itself. Whenever possible, cards should have dedicated spaces on the board instead of living in a vague area somewhere off to the side. It makes setup cleaner, the table easier to read, and gives the whole production a sense of intention.
Québec contains two different types of cards.: There are five Leader cards, all of which remain visible throughout the game. And then there are the Event cards.
Normally that wouldn't be particularly complicated, except in
Québec, here the very first Event stays in play until its objective has actually been completed. Makes two slots for Event cards. Which means the game needed seven homes for seven visible cards.
The Board Can't Be the Size of CanadaSpace is always a problem and so the most tempting solution to make the canvas bigger is not a real option. Unfortunately, board games are no exception and eventually need to fit inside a box. And for most players even more important the board has to fit on a dining table. Not everyone owns a dedicated gaming table the size of a medieval banquet hall.
Uli had already specified the box dimensions: 308 × 308 mm. Working backwards from that eventually gave us a board dimension of 780 × 560 mm. Big enough to breathe. Small enough to fit on a regular dining table. Probably. And so the first rough version was born and looked like that. Blue was the color we were going for, because
Québec's flag code is blue and orange. Which was handy because the
Bang Wong Palette suggests blue and orange as most color blind friendly.
It already looked surprisingly close to where we eventually ended up. The center contained the heart of the game: the hex tiles resting on map inspired by a historical map of
Québec, based on Jacques-Nicolas Bellin's 1744 map.
The left side housed the Leader cards. The right side became home to the Event cards, the four zones of power and a player aid that explains the cascading mechanism.
Everything in its right place, but everything... had problems. The first one is obvious: Looking suspiciously like a prototype, although I thought, that it is almost done... bit delusional.
With A Little Help From My FriendsThankfully [user=hoshbad]Sebastian Wenzlaff[/user] joined us as editor. And he made all of my design life easier (unfortunately this was not always reciprocal - drove him crazy by always inventing new file names to his perfect system - sorry! 🫠).
Good graphic design is usually a lot of quite ordinary decisions that quietly support one another. Fortunately, this is also where collaboration becomes incredibly valuable. Working with Sebastian meant there was always someone asking the right questions - or occasionally pointing out the flaw I'd become completely blind to after staring at the same file for far too long. His feedback was pointing to the things I could no longer see myself. Working together with someone is a blessing. And working together with Sebastian double.
The first thing we tackled was the centre spaces. Everything not only looked unfinished and way too bright, but also the districts were not clear enough. The visual hierarchy was weak. One of the improvements came from something surprisingly simple: Looking at the original. It had actually handled this rather well. The districts needed stronger visual separation, so we widened the borders surrounding each one and fully colored the district spaces. Suddenly your eye immediately understood where one district ended and the next began.
Sometimes, during a redesign, you spend hours trying to invent something clever, only to discover that the original designer had already solved the problem. So I learned that one of the parts of redesigning an existing game is knowing when not to redesign something.
After myriads of tiny adjustments, the center of the board finally began to behave itself. Now we could get into detail...
The Giant Arrow Nobody Asked ForWe all might develop tunnel vision at some point in our work, at least I do quite fast… Once I've spent enough hours staring at a layout, my brain is just to used to the design, that mistakes or uncertainties do play no role. Usually I pass it to a fellow designer to have a look at it (hello my wife!) or just rotate the canvas for a new angle. But sometimes it seems that tunnel vision is infectious and all just have it…
Thankfully we had Uli, who pointed out that the banners on the districts "seem to form a gigantic arrow."
And well once I saw it... I couldn't unsee it.
The district banners collectively pointed left. Not intentionally, but they just did...
It was one of those accidental compositions my eye got pulled toward now over and over again. So the banners first moved upwards and were also slimmed down in a later iteration. Problem solved. Mostly.
The Workers Were TinyThe next issue wasn't artistic at all. It was practical. Up to this point we had kept one feature from the original edition: the wooden worker cubes. They were meant to stand neatly in rows on top of the hex tiles.
On screen? Perfectly sensible.
In practice? Tiny. Fiddly. Easy to bump. And so slightly annoying.
Anyone who's ever tried placing several small cubes into precisely printed spaces while reaching across a crowded table already knows where this story is going. We eventually swapped the roles of the components. The century markers became cubes. The workers became discs. Such a tiny change. Such a massive improvement. Because the discs stacked beautifully, were easier to manipulate, and made both the end-of-round cleanup and the cascading mechanism noticeably smoother.
It's one of those invisible improvements players rarely comment on. Which is exactly what good graphic and component design should do. When nobody notices it... it's probably working. Or in the worst case players just arrange with the situation.
The accessibility was better now.
The cascade made sense.
The workers were easier to handle.
Now we could finally focus on making the board look less like a collection of individual elements and more like one cohesive game.
Leaders Need More SpaceThe second construction side was the Leader area. The cards refer to 4 respective personalities from each of the 4 eras. In the first edition they were only written at the bottom of the card. To depict them was the goal. First we made bit more space for the cards and I had placed generic historical figures there.
They looked fine. But there was an obvious question. Why was I showing anonymous people when the actual Leader cards already featured real historical personalities?
The background caused another issue. Both the board and the cards shared almost the same color. As long as every card was in place, everything looked nice.
The moment a card was taken... nothing happened. Well, technically the card was taken, but visually? It was surprisingly difficult to notice. Which is exactly the opposite of what I wanted. Empty spaces should announce themselves immediately. Instead they cleared their throats quietly.
I rotated the Leader cards into landscape orientation. That immediately distinguished them from the Event cards, which remained portrait format. Easier for players to read. Check.
Borrowing a Little ArchitectureBut I also wanted the Leader area to feel connected to
Québec itself. Rather than filling the background with decorative flourishes, I started looking at the architecture of Québec's National Assembly. Its ornamental details and the speakers chair became the inspiration for the surrounding frame. It quietly supports the theme without competing with the information players actually need.
That's often the balance you're chasing. Theme should enrich usability. Not fight it.
After that I just recolored the places where the cards lie with the background tones. Suddenly an empty slot looked... well... empty. Funny how difficult it can be to make "nothing" visible.
The Leader Cards Itself Needed Some TreatmentChanging the board meant changing the cards too. Originally, the Leader cards featured relatively small portraits. Perfectly functional. But once the board itself became more elaborate, those tiny portraits started feeling disconnected. Instead, we decided to put collages of the zones portraits on the cards. The portraits became the focal point of richer compositions that immediately gave each card more presence. The cards felt less like reference material and more like characters. That's important because players spend the entire game looking at them. If something occupies that much visual real estate, it deserves a little personality.
Part 3 – The Point Where Everything Finally Started Looking Like a GameContinuing making tiny steps and decisions...
Should this icon move up two millimetres?
Should this border be darker?
Is this heading too close to the edge?
Does this symbol still work when printed smaller?
Would anyone actually notice this? (The answer here is always yes.)
After myriads of tiny adjustments, the center of the board finally began to behave itself. The accessibility was better. The cascade made sense. The workers were easier to handle. Nothing was accidentally pointing left anymore.
Here is the board seen by someone with red-green color blindness (deuteranopia). The districts can be easily distinguished, in addition icons support readability.
The Surprisingly Easy PartThe focus of this diary is of course on the elements that changed the most during development, but some of them barely changed at all. The Event cards were one of those (except that I wanted to include an illustration of the historical event on the card). So were the building sides of the hex tiles. Both were established fairly early and remained remarkably stable throughout the project. Most later adjustments were simply the natural consequence of changes happening elsewhere. If the board colors evolved, the cards evolved with them. If icons became clearer on the board, they became clearer on the cards too. Everything stayed visually connected.
One example is the 1663 Event card, whose layout barely changed—but whose colors and iconography gradually evolved alongside the rest of the game. That meant lots and lots of color swapping. But also the change of iconography (which was the part we focused on first to keep it coherent through the game): The first player to build two buildings in three of the four colors (six buildings in total) immediately scores 8 VP, second 4 VP.
Looking BackWhen I first agreed to work on
Quebec, I honestly thought I was being hired to create new artwork. Instead, I found myself asking questions about accessibility, visual hierarchy, component usability, historical references, table space and how players actually move their eyes around a game board. It demanded a way deeper understanding of how a designer has to approach a board game.
"Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent", said Joe Sparano. Players should just simply play without getting distracted. They find the information they need. They understand what happens next. That's exactly the goal.
If players spend an evening talking about the decisions they made rather than struggling with the interface that presented those decisions, then the design has done its job, even if it is „as ugly as the night“ to some.
But I hope you enjoy the game or maybe even the read too.
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