Zak Eidsvoog: Art in Board Games #58

Editors Note: A lot of my joy running this site comes from discovering new (to me) artists. Today, I’m joined by Zak Eidsvoog, whose board game art recently caught my eye. If you love board game art, consider checking out more great interviews and artists in the archive!

Thanks for joining us, Zak! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Hi, thanks for having me! I’m a graphic designer, illustrator, and game designer (although I never know which order to put those in, haha). I was born in the Seattle area but grew up mostly in Portland, Oregon, where I now live with my wife and our dog, Kodi. 

Pretty much all of my current creative pursuits began in college (in the early 2010s), where, after a couple of years of studying mechanical engineering, I decided to switch majors to graphic design with a minor in visual art. This was also around the time I got into hobby board gaming and started experimenting with game design myself. 

A couple of years after graduating, I started freelancing for some indie board game publishers as a graphic designer and illustrator while working on my own game designs on the side. I’ve been doing all that for a little over 10 years now. 

I’ve always had a balance of game and non-game-related clients, but at this point, I’ve worked on 20+ client games in some capacity as a graphic designer/illustrator. As for my games, I have a handful that I’ve released myself as print and play games online, as well as my first published game, Confusing Lands, which was released last year.

Do you have any advice for anyone trying to break into the industry?

My advice for anyone trying to break into any creative field is to start making whatever it is you want to be making professionally (art, graphic design, games, music, whatever). Clients will be more likely to hire you if they can see you have done the kind of thing they are looking for.

If you already have good examples of your work, make sure you’re putting it in front of people who are interested in that kind of thing (have a portfolio site that’s easy to find/navigate, post in bgg forums or on reddit, go to conventions or in-person feedback groups, etc.). Make sure that you’re putting yourself out there and making it easy for people to contact you and get a quote if they’re interested in working with you!

I got my first couple of board game clients after I did a self-directed fan redesign project where I made new art and graphic design for a game I really love (Impulse by Carl Chudyk) and then shared images and some of my process on my portfolio site and on BGG.

Game jams can be another great way to get some experience working on game projects and to make connections with other people interested in games. While there are generally more jams geared towards people who make video games, tabletop game jams are also becoming more common.

With such a broad spectrum of clients, do you have a process for starting new projects?

Whenever I’m doing client graphic design/illustration, my first step is always to interview the client and make sure I understand what the goals for the project are and what makes it unique. Sometimes, there’s room for me to bring some out-of-the-box ideas before settling on something and moving forward.

For those kinds of projects, I’ll do brainstorming exercises, gather visual inspiration, and create mood boards & sketches of potential creative directions. Other times, things are pretty locked in, and it’s just important for me to get up to speed and work with what’s already there.

How does your approach change when working on your own projects?

For my personal game designs, I would say that I’m a mechanics & game-feel first person. Usually, the very first test I do with an idea is to take as many blank cards or other components as I think the game will have and practice shuffling and dealing and moving things around, imagining how the game will feel to the players. 

I tend to design my early prototypes in a somewhat abstract, themeless style to keep things flexible as I test out ideas. Laying things out this way helps me avoid getting carried away with the visuals before the gameplay is solid. Once I have something I like, I’ll either start showing it to publishers or, if it’s something I’m planning to develop myself, I will do my usual process of brainstorming, moodboarding, and pitching myself art and graphic design styles, as if I were doing a client project.

How important do you think the art is when pitching games?

Unless you’re designing something where the art is a fundamental part of the gameplay mechanics (like Dixit or Mysterium), I don’t think art is all that important when pitching games. I’ve heard from most publishers that I’ve talked to that the most important thing is that prototype components be clearly laid out and easy to understand/play with.

Keep in mind that some publishers may like your game but have a different theme they want to publish it with, or they might have specific artists they like to work with whose art style more closely matches their brand.

With all that being said, because I am an artist and a game designer, I will sometimes have ideas that I choose to develop in a more holistic way (with the art informing the game design and vice versa). When that happens, I think it’s ok to embrace doing both art and design, knowing that things might need to change later or you might end up going more in the direction of self publishing. This was essentially what happened with my game Confusing Lands although I was lucky enough to find a publisher whose vision for the game was pretty aligned with what I had already done myself.

I discovered your work through 'Confusing Lands,' a board game with a whimsical, lighthearted art style. Where did the idea for this game come from?

‘Confusing Lands’ was one of three 18-card games I designed between 2020 and 2022 during the first few years of the Covid 19 pandemic. The other two are ‘Double Date Simulator’ (available as a print-and-play game on my itch page at zak-makes-games.itch.io) and ‘Solitairra’ an as-yet-unreleased solitaire game.

Like most of my games, Confusing Lands started with a very simple, somewhat abstract art style. However, even from the beginning, I imagined a lush landscape with rules that would prompt players to build very different ecosystems from game to game. As I developed the game more, the mechanic of stacking things on top of each other — as well as the random shapes formed by the cards — led me to think it could be a game about wacky floating island chains.

What does Confusing Lands art tell us about its world?

My initial goal for the art in Confusing Lands was to find a style that would look really pretty once players had finished gathering and placing cards to complete their landscapes. I first explored a more painterly style, thinking that it would add to that lush, picturesque feeling I was going for.

However, because the art serves such an important functional purpose in the game (it’s how players tell what type of terrain a given space counts as), I quickly found that I needed an approach that would make each space’s terrain type stand out more clearly.

This led me to the final art style for the game, where each terrain type has a bold outline and a specific color associated with it. After testing out this more cartoonish style, I was pleased to find that the final landscapes still look quite pretty, with the added benefit of being easily readable.

As for the world of Confusing Lands, I knew from the beginning that I wanted the game to depict the harmony between all the different elements within the game’s world (plants, animals, people, etc.). I do think the bright, cartoonish style that I ended up using helps give a sense of positivity and symbiosis to the world which people find appealing.

You’ve mentioned you’re mechanics first when designing games. Did you draw any inspiration from other games when creating Confusing Lands?

Gameplay-wise, Confusing Lands was inspired by a number of tile/card-laying games, most directly Micro Rome, Tiny Islands (digital) and Isle of Skye. All of these give players scoring conditions to influence tile placement but I wanted to see what would happen if the scoring conditions themselves were part of the tiles/cards and therefore a larger part of the players’ decision making process. When I designed Confusing Lands, I was also playing a lot of Lost Cities, and I wanted my game to capture some of the tension of committing to new scoring opportunities in that game.

After testing out several different approaches, I settled on the system where each scoring condition you take subtracts 10 points from your final score. This sometimes means that players will score in the negatives after their first game, but I’ve found that adds to the charm and usually makes them want to try again and improve. The name Confusing Lands is kind of my way of saying, “Don’t feel bad about your first score; it’s supposed to be confusing!”

What are you reading, listening to, or looking at to fuel your work?

I’m currently reading “Masters of Atlantis” by Charles Portis (author of True Grit). It’s a fictional account of a secret society founded in the early 20th century and it has been a super fun read so far. I also recently read the Earthsea books by Ursula K. Le Guin for the first time, which really had an impact on how I think about life and art in general. A couple of great art books I picked up recently are “Umbra” by Jordan Speer and “Houses with a Story” by Seiji Yoshida.

Comics-wise I’ve been following the webcomic “3rd Voice” by Evan Dahm, as well as anything that Simon Roy puts out. Pretty much the only TV show I watch these days is Taskmaster, but as a game designer I find it very inspiring and enjoyable (my wife and I are eagerly awaiting the next season). We’ve also started renting older/foreign movies from the library and two really great ones we saw recently were After Life (1998) and Petite Maman (2021).

Besides all that, I find a lot of inspiration in nature, especially going on hikes in the Columbia River Gorge or along the Oregon coast. My wife is a singer and we have a lot of friends in the performing arts, which I’m super grateful for. Being part of a community of people working to make art always inspires me to keep working on my own projects.

Finally, where can we find you if we’d like to see more of you and your work?

You can find me at zakeidsvoog.com and on pretty much all the socials at @zakeidsvoog, although Bluesky is probably where I’m most active these days. You can also find my personal games that are available for print and play at zak-makes-games.itch.io. Lastly, if newsletters are more your thing, you can sign up for mine at zak-makes-games.beehiiv.com/subscribe for occasional updates on the art and game design stuff I’m working on.