The forgotten creatures of the forest have awoken from their slumber and nobody knows for sure what is lurking in the Iron Valley. You followed the call of your king. Now it is time for heroic deeds! Defeat mechanical monsters, retrieve enigmatic artefacts, use helpful items and lead your faction to glory. Each round three expedition are leaving into the unknown to explore this mysterious place. You form three groups, one for each expedition, with the heroes on your hand. Only the strongest groups can take part in an expedition, so you need to portion your power. Can you read your opponents well enough and forestall them? Are you worthy of the title “The Boldest”? Then collect the most experience and become a legend!
The Boldest is a board game which I illustrated, layout and designed for Berlin board game company Spielwiese. The game consist of 45 individual characters half of which belong to themed 'factions' you can play.
A big challenge was to keep all of the characters seemingly equal while giving them visual diversity for each character. The theme of the game is sci fi based in a forest setting while also keeping the theme of fantasy swords and arrows to avoid guns.
The support creatures are the factions each individual support character, they had to be approachable but also not too similar to the characters so they are seen as lead characters, I thought going off the factions secondary colors while introducing there themes through items would be a good touch.
In the game items are used to get monsters and artifacts (eg. a jetpack to get to a flying monster'. The items had to be an item which you wanted to pick up, nothing too boring in comparison to the rest of the board.
The monsters in the game in which you score points are mainly based on mythical creatures such as: Minotaurs, Unicorns, Ogres, Manticore, Gnomes. A challenge when making the illustrations was to make sure the creatures were in size with each other, the lowest scoring creature is no bigger than a cat while the Minotaur is a hulking monster which looms over characters, this was mainly done with background art and eye size, the larger the creatures had smaller eyes, not only making the monster appear bigger but also more threatening.
Another way of scoring points is by picking up artefacts, to represent the levels of each artefact, it needed a hierarchy of importance, the lower tier artefacts are more like parts to a computer, while the higher tier pieces are more like major computers or structures with also more detail to what has been happening in this forest.
There are 5 playable factions in the game. In the two here are the Monks and the Nautical factions.
The Monks I based off the armor off terracotta pots and using oxidized bronze bells as the secondary color, a weird mix of modern and old materials.
The Nautical is more of a ship crew of rapscallions, rusted, collected bits and dirty clothing, they have a more approachable and humourous theme than the rest.
Original concepts of the character factions and monsters.
