MOLD game artifacts

I grew up playing tabletop resource management games with my family every Sunday, between our the morning trip to the Farmers’ Market and afternoon visit to Hui Lau Shan. Most often, the game would either be Wingspan or Terraforming Mars. While one is focused on ornithology, and the other is more dystopian, the overlap between them—and, in my opinion, what makes them fun to play—is that they’re representational of real contexts. Birds with certain diets tend to develop related characteristics like egg or beak type, and participate in their environment differently. Strip mining on Mars has drastically different social and environmental impacts than investing in microbial research. When your choices have meaning, (or produce a simulation through Mimicry, as Roger Caillois stated in 1958 in The Classification of Games) they become more joyous.

That’s why I was disappointed with my first assignment for Game Design. The idea was for every student to come up with a character design to participate in a hex-mapped classwide game, with standard principles like dealing damage, moving, and healing. This completely went against what I found fun about games, and reduced my game-making autonomy to aesthetics. So I created an anti-character, Mold, that operates totally atypically. It was tricky to balance the character so that it wouldn’t be OP’d, and could still participate in overall game mechanics. Instead of a singular character tile that moves, Mold builds on itself and develops layers, in addition to spreading horizontally. It can also transfer life points to different sections to maintain its life.

I designed the graphics and laser-cut pieces in Illustrator and handpainted the pieces with acrylic paint to resemble mold.

A slick deck of character cards and accompanying hand-painted pieces, meant for a collaborative board game. Each card contains resources, which are then translated to a hex tile map.

Rulebook, character card, and cultures with allocated life points.

Action cards.