Triptych

April 2024

For my senior year, Triptych served as a personal capstone/thesis project as part of the BFA exhibition. I’ve been eager to design a board game since my freshman year, and ideas for it have been roaming around my head since then. Creating and submitting a project that wasn’t assigned was initially daunting, as I was responsible for motivating myself through every step without having a clear framework in mind. I needed to demonstrate my capability to manage a project from start to finish and push a concept all the way to its endpoint.

The conceptual ideas for Triptych sprouted from my artist statement for the BFA, which discussed letting go of the burden of expectations that seek to control us with a focus on play. A board game about creating a character, devoid of expectations, interested me. After collecting a few board games and understanding their design process and language, I landed on an engine-building foundation and developed my ideas from there. Inspired primarily by Wingspan, an engine-building bird-collecting board game, I started with the idea that the engines here are people you create based on cards. Soon after, everything fell into place. The game is from the perspective of a kid wondering what they want to be when they grow up, not limited by the confines of a normal career. Each card has different stats and abilities. The head allows you to draw more cards, the torso lets you collect resources to play the cards, and the legs let you move on the board. These cards are stacked together and activated at the same time to play their abilities when possible, focusing on creating combinations of mismatched characters rather than trying to put the characters back together. Finally, bonus cards add special game-changing effects. Though the game isn’t entirely playable, I opted to focus on the board game as a design study.

In terms of its visual identity, Triptych combines the Bauhaus colors and blocky aesthetic of old toy kids' blocks with vintage wooden letter blocks, reflected in the wood grain and ornamental borders. Red, blue, yellow, and black emanate childhood play as well as Bauhaus. It seeks to unite child and adult, the past and the present, and work within the gap. Making the identity seem consistent was quite a challenge, but I believe I chose a direction that is unique, interesting, and reflects my style.

studiorahman.com

INDEX NEXT