HRISHITA
ACHARYA

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The Magic Circle  2024
Board Game 
Collaborative Project with Catherine Huang, Cindy Li, and Francesca Golden
A semi-cooperative game designed to simulate democratic leadership processes.

Players play as a group of witches completing trials to save your coven and become its next leader. As the game board is consumed by angry spirits of witches past, players race to fulfill their own prophecies, while working together to complete the Magic Circle and save the coven.

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Learning from the mechanics of tabletop games like Catan, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Forbidden Island, and DnD, we created a semi-cooperative experience that explores how shifting goals and emergent systems can shape player dynamics, using shared resources and asymmetric roles to drive engagement. 


My main focus in this collaborative process was to create an engaging and immersive experience for players. I played a key role in constructing the game’s narrative, writing the instructions and flavour text, and defining player roles and prophecies. I helped develop a framework for each round and clarify player actions and movements, aligning the game’s mechanics to a meaningful and compelling narrative.

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For the game board, I crafted textured patterns to be rastered on the board tiles. The tiles use a geode pattern to evoke a cave-like space that collapses as the Spirits destroy the board. This added another dimension of immersion to the game.

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The goals for our game tokens were for them to be simple, readable and full of character. I was inspired by minimalistic games  where tokens are identifiable through colour and silhouette rather than detailed  forms.
Using clay gave the pieces a handmade finish that players appreciated during the playtest.


Player Tokens:
Early sketches included human-like figures, but we pivoted to anthropomorphic animals to add an element of whimsy and create characters that players could identify with more personally.

Character Illustrations (by Cindy Li)

Spirit Tokens:

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Game Zine:

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Playtest: