Top 10 Favorite Games With Great Graphic Design
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
- In today’s video I’m joined by special guest Julio to discuss our favorite games with superb graphic design, user interface (UI), and product design. Graphic design is the icons, layout, user interface, typography, and everything else that pulls the art and mechanisms for a game together into a cohesive visual experience.
Viewer picks: Anachrony, Dune Imperium, Kanban, Ra, Century, Unmatched, Architects of the West Kingdom, Sleeping Gods, Trekking Through History, Carnegie, Iki, Parks
Ambassador picks: Ark Nova, Century, Cthulhu Death May Die, Dune Imperium, Eclipse, Federation, Kanban EV, Marvel United, On Mars, Parks, Raiders of the North Sea, Scythe, Voidfall, Botany
Julio’s Top 5
Honorable mentions: Teotihuacan, Tzolkin, Viscounts of the West Kingdom, Root, Ark Nova, Terraforming Mars, Everdell
5. Eclipse (Jere Kasanen)
4. The King's Dilemma
3. The Search for Planet X (Jason Kingsley)
2. The Fox Experiment (Stevo Torres)
1. Dice Throne (Gavan Brown)
Jamey’s Top 5
Stonemaier mentions: Charterstone, Scythe, Tapestry, Apiary, Rolling Realms
Honorable mentions: Stonespine Architects, Dice Throne, Tzolk’in, Architects of the West Kingdom, Terra Mystica, On Tour (rulebook size), Ark Nova, Dune Imperium, Bullet, Great Western Trail
5. Ra (player mat: Ian O’Toole)
4. Lost Ruins of Arnak (delineating token: Filip Murmak)
3. First in Flight (card sizes: Sarah Lafser and Tomasz Bogusz)
2. Santa’s Workshop (foil ornaments, different tile textures: Matt Paquette)
1. Let’s Go to Japan (icons don’t require another reference: Brigette Indelicato)
Also watch a video about my favorite language-independent games: • My Top 10 Favorite Lan...
00:00 - Introduction & Honorable Mentions
6:45 - 5
12:20 - 4
20:20 - 3
27:50 - 2
38:30 - 1
Become a champion of this channel: stonemaier-games.myshopify.co...
podcast link: stonemaiergames.com/about/pod...
Intro animation by Jeff Payne vimeo.com/jaaronpayne 
Игры
It was fun filming this with you! Thank you for the opportunity!
Thanks Julio!
Dice Throne’s graphic design is beautiful and intuitive. Tells you what is important at a glance.
Thanks so much for putting these together Jamey! I've been eagerly anticipating this video. They say good graphic design is invisible and so it's nice to be able to highlight it.
I love the icons in Wyrmspan, especially "when played".
Parks and Caper Europe, both from Keymaster Games have beautiful and intuitive icons.
Beer and Bread has the board interface overlayed on the art very well which makes it quite immersive, like you talked about for Fox Experiment/Wingspan.
I also think scythe and even moreso Expeditions have really great, intuitive iconography.
Thanks! I agree that Keymaster Games has excellent graphic design.
This is not a common opinion, but I was recently impressed by the graphic design in The White Castle. For a fairly substantial, language-independent euro game, I find the iconography super intuitive (once you know the game, of course).
Rise to Nobility as "worker placement" example of great design.
This was a great topic and a fun video to watch! Thank you for putting spotlight on graphic design! :-)
Thanks for helping us with graphic design over the last few years!
Its a recent play for me so its in my head, but Thats Pretty Clever is almost entirely graphic design and makes everything really intuitive of how each field works and scores. Also, Spots is great, where the pips on the dice become the spots on the dogs!
Some of my favourites are Flamecraft, Gizmos, SpellBook, Wyrmspan, Dorf Romantik, Brew, and Verdant. Also, the coins in Wyrmspan have a very cool foil finish on them.
Great list!
Talking about Lost Ruins of Arnak, Planta Nubo is the game wherethey used identical mechanic. Left side cards, Right side cards and round tracker. Left side are end of game scoring cards, right side are power cards.
Nearly looks as if you 2 are sitting next to each other, since the shelf is so perfect on the edge of the camera, haha.
Those player mats for RA are very helpful for the game, but they were directly taken from the Japanese version of the original game. Not sure who designed those, but they deserve the credit for the design.
I didn't know that! I appreciate you sharing the credit.
Ian O'Toole is king. Just look at voidfall. Super complicated game, 4 pages of iconography, but since the graphic design is so intuitive, you never really ever have to look at that booklet to figure out what symbols mean. so amazing. In any other graphic design format, that game becomes unplayable and very unwieldy
The interesting about Garphil games is 1) Shem Phillips does the graphic design for the games so UI / UX is built into the games as they are developed and 2) the iconography is consistent across the trilogies of games.
I love that consistent iconology, and I didn't know that Shem took care of the graphic design for his games. Impressive!
@@jameystegmaier If you look at some of their early prototypes (which they sometimes share on videos), you can see the (almost) final iconography. Now THAT's a prototype.
Thanks for posting a video on this topic. Both of you presented examples and details that were right on point. I had to watch it twice. Maybe for a future topic you could choose luxury games. I recently played a game of Scythe and was quite impressed with the quality of the game and components. It gave me a feel that I was using something special. A lot of games have a great quality feel these days and you could do a video on components with likes and dislikes. Thanks again for the video.
Thanks Chris! You might enjoy this video on the topic of components: ruclips.net/video/-k8W9euOk4A/видео.htmlsi=4xU4_fTY2CUq6t1g
Are most games submitted without (or very little) design and/or art?
I was drawn into board games because of the art and can't wrap my head around a designer only developing the mechanisms and actual game play actions.
Am I way off base, or just missing a piece of the story?
Yes, most games are submitted as prototypes with only basic graphic design and maybe some sample illustrations. The graphic design and art are significant expenses that the publisher is responsible for. It's actually a really good way to test how well you've integrated theme into your game if you playtest without art (thematic nomenclature is fine).
@@jameystegmaier Very wise insight. Play testing a game for first time with most of graphics removed and the mechanical holes are evident without the "squirrel" effect of the art.
Commenting before watching to mention a game that I bet won't be on the list: Ex Libris. This game is a real mixture; it is rightly criticized for the very poor user interface of the "locations" - the text there is too small and too low contrast. But what I wanted to mention was something they did that was outstanding. There are 6 types of books you collect, and at the end of the game, you have to count up the number of each type you've collected. When I first read the rules, I was sure that would be a nightmare, as each card could have 4 different icons on it, so you have to scan your collected cards 6 times trying to count accurately. But the icons are amazing. They pop. They are very easy to discriminate. It is never a chore scoring that game because of how beautifully and thoughtfully the cards are designed. Shame that didn't extend to the location tiles, but the cards, they really got that right.
I'll mention a couple more. I really love that the Terraforming Mars cards have both icons and text. A hidden benefit of this is that over the first couple of games you are being trained the recognize the iconography. You might never read the text again after that, but if the text weren't there, you might not have learned it so well. And because the text is there, new players can keep up with seasoned players. (The game has a ton of "tags", but they are very distinct.) Ark Nova does a similarly good job.
Newton. Newton has a variable set up requiring a lot of "pick 5 of these 10 tiles at random and place them on the board and the rest in the box." You do that kind of thing with several tile types. However, they made the tiles have unique shapes, and they placed outlines on the boards in those shapes. That idea - of using multiple unique shapes for tiles with matching outlines - can be a real time saver. At some point you can stop referring to the step by step set up instructions because the board tells you how to do it.
Scythe. The player board and faction mats are so well done.
I love these examples! Thanks Steven.