This is a board game mock-up that I initially began sometime last fall and have been working on it on and off since then. Within a short period of time I was watching a lot of the 60’s Scooby-Doo cartoon and saw the movie Contagion (2011) which sparked the idea of a Pandemic styled game set in a Hanna Barbera/Scooby-Doo influenced world where characters had very different sets of skills and all players had an individual victory condition. I liked the idea of different factions trying to handle a common problem, but where they all have different agendas which make cooperation much more challenging, which also solved my main concern with cooperative games where I feel like one player usually end up in charge ordering the other players around. Just for the sake of having a title I’ve called it PCA (Pandemic Control Agency), feeling a bit hesitant directly referencing Pandemic in the title since it’s one of the main inspirations for the concept, but my naming skills are very lacking at the moment
I began the process by collecting a lot of references of character faces that appeared in the earlier Scooby-Doo shows, and then tried to deconstruct the faces by redrawing them, drawing over them, trying to understand the style. And after a while I started to see some design patterns; I couldn’t really construct the faces “part by part” as I were used to, going from a generic face to more and more specific features.
Instead I had to establish a bold head shapes from the very start. When I later tried to design my own characters based on the Scooby-Doo style I found that I was using too many lines, packing too much information into the faces. Scooby-Doo characters seldom had more than 4-5 bold lines/shapes that made up the face.
The pictures above are the finished character portraits. A full version of the game would probably have more characters, but for this mock-up I just wanted a few designs to show the variety of the actors. As I might have hinted at earlier it would be set in the 60’s in some fictional area in the middle east where the cold war powers played out their influence. I wanted the characters to be of different hierarchies in the factions to underline the chaos generated by the outbreak. Everything from regular doctors who are flung into positions of authority to businessmen trying to protect their skin in this conflict
One of my design philosophies is that I want the actual playing pieces to be immersive, actual “props” that fit the narrative of the game instead of just icons representing game mechanics. Therefore since the narrative is that some intergovernmental organization, called the PCA, is trying to solve this pandemic outbreak the character sheet are supposed to look like the files that the PCA have on hand of important actors in this area.
Keeping with the Scooby-Doo theme I was looking for a graphic design that could look like “in universe”, something that could have been seen in a cartoon of that time. Admittedly a lot of the graphic design in Scooby-Doo are not very complicated so I had too look outside the cartoons for inspirations to make a more well rounded design. I found a lot of fake documents from spy movies, and some real documents from the same era to be very useful to my design.
As I mentioned earlier each player would have a secret objective to bring in a element of conflict to a otherwise cooperative game. I am not sure how it would work out mechanically but it would be interesting if these objectives were handed out at random, making an American businessman protect russian interest or a Russian general working on behalf of a hospital.
