The Magic Circle: A Board Game
Game Design (2024)
This game was designed in collaboration with Catherine Huang, Hrishita Acharya, and Cindy Li (RISD ‘26).
About the Game
In this semi-cooperative board game, players take on the role of witches completing trials to save their 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.
Game play progresses through collective decision-making, requiring players to balance personal goals with group priorities while managing time and resources. It introduces urgency, conflict, and resentment, allowing players to practice resolving interpersonal challenges under pressure.
My Contributions
Throughout the design process, I lead brainstorming sessions on the design of the physical pieces and helped fine tune the mechanics of the game.
My focus was on embodying a positive sense of leadership into player interactions and encourage discussion in between turns in order to foster a fun, collaborative, and competitive environment. To do this, I helped define player roles, build the framework of a player’s turn, diversify possible outcomes of a dice roll, and designed the Ritual tiles and associated actions.
As the board designer, I defined its style, coloring, and materials. A key design decision was making the board deconstructable to allow for reduced packaging and encourage collaborative assembly during the game’s setup. After 4 main iterations, I landed on a board that was tactile, was easy to assemble and take apart, and had a striking visual identity that streamlined gameplay.
To design the Prophecy Cards, I took inspiration from the game Betrayal at House on the Hill to design a sliding scale for players to dynamically change their characters’ strengths throughout the game. I designed slots so that the sliding arrows stay permanently attached to the cards, avoiding loss of pieces in the future.
Playtest: Game Night
During a public playtest, we hosted 2 rounds of the game, observing how players interacted with the unfamiliar material and how their natural curiosities worked both alongside and against our intentions as designers. We recognized strong elements of play and strategic thinking among our testers, but the initial setup took longer than expected due to an overload of information. We used these observations to clarify the game’s instructions by providing a more digestible guide to our game’s setup and win conditions.
We also strengthened the game’s graphic identity by expanding on our character illustrations to improve our worldbuilding and allow players to further immerse themselves in our world.