HIGHLIGHTS | Board games

With Christmas around the corner, most of us have probably been into at least one toy store. Sometimes with a clear goal in our minds and other times without anything specific—looking for the right, the perfect, something funny and entertaining, or perhaps something promoting strategic thinking or something that simply depends on luck.

We long to play, to experience carefree joy for a few hours, to solve the puzzle, to sink the battleship, to win the household voucher so that we can finally get the much-anticipated color television, the ping pong table or the vacuum cleaner. We do our best, we think, we play what we are dealt, we bluff, we go bankrupt if need be, or we take it all. „All is fair in love and war” as the saying goes, and we take our enemy’s token with a perfectly still face.

Tables, tokens, dices, cards—the props of a whole other universe, the unique rules of which we must learn to play by. But how can a packaging convey the core of the game, the spirit of the product, childlike excitement or hours of laughter? Here are two fine solutions from Hungary, accompanied by some pretty eye-catching examples from New Zealand, Italy and the United States.

Kitti Mayer
design theorist

The Game of Lies | Auckland, New Zealand
Smug Liberal Minority