What Lies Within is a board game designed by myself (Mechanics / Visual Direction), Dylan Morehead (Narrative Design / Mechanics), Will Wayfinder (Project Lead), Phin Pearson (UI/UX Design), and Henry Marchant (Mechanics / Content Research). It won the SCAD Entelechy award for best Tabletop Game in 2023.

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What Lies Within is a horror board game that puts the player into one of 12 different character's shoes to explore the decrepit and mysterious woods that now traps them as they search for a way to escape. But beware, if you lose yourself to the forest, it may change you.

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The goal of the game is to collect three idol keys that match the color of one of the four available exits on the board. In order to collect a key, the player must discover the location of the idol and defeat the creature that guards it. Once three keys have been collected, the player must navigate the forest to the gate that their keys unlock and escape. As the player moves around the board, events will occur that can be beneficial, or drain their health and sanity. Choose carefully during these events, and you may just make it out alive.

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A unique aspect of our game is that it is designed so that when a player dies or loses all sanity, the game is not over and they can continue to play, but now they control the twisted creature their player has become in an attempt to keep any of the other players from escaping. 

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In total we worked on this game for 5 weeks, and myself and a few other members of the team have continued its development and hope to create physical versions of the game with even more engaging mechanics, story, items and events to encounter!

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DISCLAIMER: The art for the cards in the game was generated from Midjourney. We chose to utilize AI as none of our team members were illustrators and in the 5 week timeframe we wanted to deliver a game that still looked like a finished project in order to not distract from the mechanics and gameplay itself with placeholder artwork. We do not claim rights to any of the images used nor do we claim they are our own work / creations.

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The board design itself was my largest task outside of designing game mechanics and balancing, in total I spent about 50 hours of development time on the board alone, utilizing over 300 individual AI generated images and meticulously cutting elements, stitching together and blending, and manually adding shadow effects and details over the paths. We wanted the paths to resemble a reverse pentagram and the pathways that connect them were carefully considered and planned out to provide multiple routes and options of varying difficulty to the player while they try to reach each idol location.

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