Board Game Arena
Making a platform of several hundred games readable at scale: identity, art direction and journeys for more than ten million players.
2016 → · Board Game Arena · Visual identity, art direction, UX
Context
Board Game Arena lets people play hundreds of published board games in the browser. In 2013 its interface was still an insiders’ tool: dense, text-heavy, built for people who already knew what they were looking for. My story with the platform began with occasional interface questions from Grégory Isabelli; in 2016 it led to a redesign of the identity and navigation.
What was at stake
At the scale of millions of players, a small interface weakness immediately stops being small. Every page has to welcome the newcomer without slowing down the nightly player, across very different habits, ages and levels of experience.
The work
Art direction of the platform since 2016. During the growth of the Covid years, the outside became the inside: I became its first employee.
- Visual identity
- Art direction of the platform and its game pages
- UX of the main journeys
Results
More than ten million players. The 2013 and 2026 home pages, side by side, show the distance covered.