I’m tired of going to the game store and seeing the same three themes over and over again. Here are 17 weird themes. Feel free to use them!
- Assembly Guide/Warning Label. Featureless human shapes assembling/being attacked by geometric shapes in a stark, right-angle-aplenty abstract space. Great for light games!
- Vegetable Collage. Penguins made out of eggplants! Mighty warriors carved from, I don’t know, a carrot or something! A mountain range in a pumpkin!
- Fortune Teller Machine. Go to the nearest tacky fortune teller machine and get a fortune. Use the aesthetic of the card as the basis of everything in your favorite project.
- Yellow Submarine. Not the actual movie, but the same idea of a queasy psychedelic art style and weird critters.
- What People In The 19th Century Thought The 25th Century Would Be Like.
- The Everglades. There’s a bunch of cool animals there!
- 1930s Shanghai. Did you know that Shanghai in the 1930s is a rich setting for noir fiction and intrigue? Now you do.
- Antarctica. Either “cool ice science” or “blizzardy horror” could work here.
- Playstation-era 3D graphics. Enough 16-bit throwbacks! Blocky approximations of the human figure or bust!
- Content Aggregator Site. Collect sets to form an ad-sponsored slideshow! Or take the safe option and make a listicle.
- Tsukiji Fish Market. It’s a giant fish market with a bunch of loud auctions going on all the time. The potential here should be obvious.
- Marché Bastille. While I’m at it, how about the gigantic outdoor market in the middle of Paris?
- Interior Design. Take your tile-laying games to the small time as you passive-aggressively rearrange furniture in one or several houses!
- Ballet. There’s several theatre-themed games but ballet, IMO, lends itself to board games even better, as it’s easier to judge whether something is following the script.
- Protestant Reformation. The spread of Protestantism is fascinating, and could have design space for a COIN-style 2 player wargame.
- 1910s College. Back when football players wore stripy shirts, all professors wore caps and gowns all the time, and the Marx Brothers terrorized the land.
- Aaaaaaaaaand trains.