A complete tabletop game: rules, cards, board, box, art

Project: design and ship a complete tabletop board game, ready to hand to a manufacturer. Make it real, make it beautiful, make it play.

Laura, this one is for the use case gallery, so it has to land as shock and awe. I want the whole thing, from the idea to a box that looks like it is already sitting on the shelf at the best game store in the city.

The concept seed, your team owns the final design: a magical night market. Players run rival food stalls in a floating, lantern-lit market where the customers are spirits, travelers, and odd little creatures. Compete for the best ingredients, draw the biggest crowds, and outshine the stall next door before the market closes at dawn. Cozy on the surface, sharp underneath. Easy to learn, hard to master.

Style is locked, do not freelance it: warm, hand-illustrated, storybook meets modern tabletop, rich color and lantern light, full of charm, never cluttered. The production polish of a top-tier modern board game publisher. One coherent look across the box, the board, and the cards.

Make it actually play. This is the rigor bar, the equivalent of getting the weight and balance right on the jet. I want a game a stranger could open and learn in ten minutes, and a group would want to play again:

• Core loop, turn structure, and win condition, with a short designer rationale for why it stays balanced and why no single strategy runs away with it.
• A complete rulebook, learn-in-ten, with a worked example of one turn and one endgame.
• Player count, age range, and average play time, stated and defended by the design.

Deliverables, the whole nine yards:

• Game concept and world bible: the hook, the fantasy, the tone.
• The full game board, illustrated, to scale, print-ready layout.
• Card design: a real set of example cards with art, names, flavor text, and stats. Show ingredient cards, customer cards, and event cards.
• Component list with quantities and physical specs: board, cards, tokens, dice, player pieces, box dimensions.
• Visual identity: logo, palette, typography, applied consistently across everything.
• Box art, front and back, with a back-of-box pitch that sells the game in five seconds.
• Photoreal product mockups so it looks like it already exists: the closed box, the board mid-game with pieces and cards in play, a fan of cards. This is the shot that goes in the gallery.

Standard: a stranger should believe this is a real product from a real publisher with a real design team behind it. Buildable, balanced, and beautiful. Ship it like it goes to print Monday.