Sketch First, Play Later: Allowing Illustration to Influence Game Design in Board Games

Anni Paz's paper examines a practice that is uncommon in board game development: beginning the design process with illustration rather than mechanics, with art treated as a foundational influence instead of a late-stage addition. The work situates this approach against established analytical frameworks such as MDA and Schell's Elemental Tetrad, while acknowledging critiques that these models suit videogames better than tabletop games, which lack automatic feedback and depend on a player to teach the rules. Ryan Laukat's 2018 keynote, which argued for a narrative-first focus and an illustration-to-narrative-to-mechanics workflow, provides a key point of reference, alongside the practices of designers such as Jamey Stegmaier.

The study's primary evidence comes from interviews with four board game designers, drawn from ten contacted, who work from illustration. Their accounts, which include examples such as Scythe, describe illustration as a thematic anchor that shapes both narrative and mechanics. The designers identified risks as well, including attachment to existing artwork that resists change and the high cost of revising completed art. Nearly all of them rejected AI-generated imagery as a substitute for human artistic input. The paper concludes that illustration-first design can yield cohesive and successful games, but it is not a universal method and requires deliberate design effort to apply well.

Across the interviews, designers reported using an illustration to unify a game's theme, narrative, mechanics, and visual identity, producing greater cohesion and immersion for players. The author is clear, however, that the method's concrete effects on the design process remain under-studied. The paper proposes future work in which the interview findings would guide the design of several board games, with the development process documented step by step. The surrounding bibliography draws on research into game design frameworks, prototyping, and mechanics ontologies, along with reference titles such as Klondike Rush, Sleeping Gods, Scythe, and Flamecraft.