Interviews with Unmatched Architects
Heather Vaughan
Artist for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Teen Spirit
You've had the opportunity to illustrate for a pretty wide range of media; in what ways does board game illustration differ from the other forms of media you've worked on (comics, advertising, etc.)?
Heather: With the exception of comics, I don't really think illustrating for a board game is much different than any other illustration gig. A lot of the job is working to a brief in your specific artistic voice, and that really doesn't change whether it's for a board game or a book cover. A lot of the art I did for the unmatched cards could absolutely be used in other forms of media without needing to be changed.
Are there any rituals or routines you have to get into "work mode"?
Heather: I have to have a hot drink (usually coffee) and I need to be in my chair, which my husband has dubbed “the PopPop chair” because it's my grandfather's old leather recliner. Then I generally queue up one of my “work shows”, options include ER, Band of Brothers, West Wing, or X-Files. I also have a terrible habit of wanting to work nights. I'm a self-imposed 3rd shifter which absolutely nukes my daytime productivity. I will sometimes switch the rituals up, as I can get pretty set in my ways which can actually make it harder to work sometimes.
Do you play any board games, and if so what types of games do you tend to enjoy? If you play Unmatched, do you have a favorite character/map to play?
Heather: This is a very controversial take, but I'm actually not a gamer at all. I believe I have only ever played Unmatched one time (I was Spike, I don't remember how I did🫣). Board games were never really my thing at all and I tend to absolutely zone out when someone insists I try playing one. I do really enjoy party games though, Taboo and Scatagories are big favorites of mine.
How were you initially approached to work on Unmatched?
Heather: Jason Taylor, one of the designers on the Unmatched series, had originally reached out to me about working with a few other artists to make posters for Restoration Games' newest game at the time, Fireball Island, back in 2018. After working together on that project he kept me in mind as a concept artist for another game, Return to Dark Tower, which happened at the same time Buffy Unmatched was in its planning stages. Jason chatted with me about the overlap and he felt that I'd be a better fit on Buffy, and with me being such a huge Buffy fan, it was a no-brainer to shift gears and dive into that.
Did you have any familiarity/attachment to the Buffy series before working on the Buffy set?
Heather: I was and remain a MASSIVE Buffy fan. My father was a big fan as well and didn't really mind that I was a bit too young to be watching it when it was still airing, so I've been watching the Scooby Gang dust Vamps since I was just a little guy. I legitimately cried when they told me they wanted me to work on Buffy. Working on any established IP can be really cool, but when it's a property you already enjoy and are a fan of, being asked to officially contribute to the story of a character and world is such a neat thing and a big honor (and also a bit terrifying, the pressure you put on yourself to do it justice can be a lot).
To date, you are the first and one of the very few artists in the history of Unmatched to do all of the art for both characters and maps in a single Unmatched product. With a lot of your art being character-focused, how did you approach such environmentally-focused pieces?
Heather: While a lot of the art I *show* is character-based, I do have experience with scenery and background work (Tangent: I actually quit art in high school and worked on stage crew for a long time and was in charge of making sets and painting scrims etc, a job which followed me into my college years as I used to go back to the surrounding high schools and work part-time doing sets for the various spring plays). So I guess I approached it like doing a set for a play. Focusing on making a recognizable setting, without overdoing it on details so that the board didn't become too overwhelming. I tend to be texture-heavy with color and saturation turned up to 11, so trying to stay on just this side of “all-out visual assault” is my goal.
Were there elements to the maps you felt you needed to include to capture such iconic locales from the Buffy series as Sunnydale High and The Bronze?
Heather: Yes, those locations are pretty recognizable so bringing those elements in to make sure my interpretation of the spaces was something players would immediately recognize was important. I think speaking personally, I didn't execute that aspect as well as I could have. If I could go back and spend a little more time on the boards I'd actually bring in a little more detail.
You're very open about using reference images during your artistic process, a practice that you used for the Buffy set cover; how do you go about determining how to pose for yourself to get your reference images just right?
Heather: It's a very scientific process that basically boils down to “does this look cool?”. I actually can't really visualize in my head - like I don't see a picture of an apple when I think apple - which is pretty annoying for someone who works in the visual arts. So seeing the thing is really important to me. There are a lot of embarrassing photos/videos of me, my partner, and my friends dressed up weird and acting crazy on my various devices in the service of reference. Then I just basically collage everything together and then move things around, and warp images until the basic composition looks compelling. Then I can get in there and worry about likeness and costume etc.
You have a history illustrating for a variety of comic book companies, including Marvel. Had you previously done any work featuring Cloak/Dagger, Ms. Marvel, or Squirrel Girl prior to Teen Spirit?
Heather: Nope! Those were my first Marvel characters. I never saw myself as a superhero-type artist so I think the teen spirit characters were a good segue in for me!
Where did you come up with the idea of featuring each character's initials as a part of their cardbacks?
Heather: All credit there goes to the designers! For both Buffy and Teen Spirit, I only did the card fronts. The cardbacks, and the other bits like hit counters, were all done by the design team who do an outstanding job of making sure the design and the illustrations all work nicely with each other, which is no easy feat with all the different artists on the individual games.
Were there any particular iterations of these characters you drew from as influences/inspirations for these interpretations of them?
Heather: I don't think specifically, I was given references by the folks at Restoration, and also did a lot of my own research, so I just spent a lot of time combing through comics to get a better idea of the characters and their abilities.
Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl are distinctly less spooky characters than a majority of your subject material. Did you find yourself approaching their art any differently than the other Unmatched characters you had worked on?
Heather: Yes. It was actually super difficult and a big learning curve for me. The way I work is as I said before, generally dark and pretty gritty, and also fairly representational. This was the first time I was working from reference that was other drawings, and in the case of Ms. Marvel and Squirrel Girl, those representations were a bit more cartoony than I usually work. I think that struggle to kinda find where those characters lived when *I* was drawing them can be seen in the work I did for that series. When I look at the work, I can definitely see where I was unsure and searching a bit.
You play around a lot with the boundaries of the cards in this set (Ms. Marvel grabbing the edges of the frame for Slingshot, or Squirrel Girl making quirky comments in the margins of the cards). What inspired you to make such creative use of the card space?
Heather: Again, all credit to the art direction on that! In addition to not being a gamer, I also don't really read a lot of comics, especially not superhero comics. So whereas for Buffy I was really comfortable in the world and in my element, it was a bit of the opposite for Teen Spirit. I was relying pretty heavily on the art direction to guide me to make sure these characters had the right vibe on paper so to speak. Absolutely all credit to them!
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In my own work, I don't like breaking borders unless there is a need for it. If it's not necessary to tell a story or emphasize an action, I think it can get gimmicky-looking, so I personally won't think of doing it much if left to my own devices in my work. I do think that Teen Spirit lends itself to the subject matter more. Border- and frame-breaking are important to the narrative in comics, as they help emphasize areas of dialogue and push or pull narrative. It can also help lead the eye on pages that are dense with panels, so it makes a lot of sense to me that those panel-breaking aspects would be something to utilize in Teen Spirit to underscore that connection to the original media.
For the alternative art pack Restoration released on GameFound, you illustrated the Medusa card Hiss and Slither. Seeing as you have a self-proclaimed love for all things reptilian, did you get a say in which character/card you worked on, or was it just a coincidence that you had the opportunity to work on a Medusa card?
Heather: Oh, I absolutely jumped on that Medusa card as soon as I saw it was available. I'm sure literally no one involved was surprised 🤣
Did you have a particular idea for Hiss and Slither in mind from the get-go or did the direction of the card art evolve over time?
Heather: Art direction was left pretty open for those cards, so I went and indulged in what was basically a fun personal piece of fan art. Drawing snakes is actually difficult, the scales are a pain, and it's really easy to just end up with weird-looking tube creatures, so I really enjoyed getting to sit down and work out how to draw a snake well. It was also a fun excuse to haul all my own snakes out and really look at them and take lots of photos. I personally have 11 of my own snakes and they are all different shapes and sizes, even their scales are formed differently from one to the next. So I wouldn't say I had a solid idea going in, but I absolutely knew I wanted to be extremely self-indulgent about it. Also a lot of pressure to do it well since everyone knows I'm the weirdo snake girl on the Internet. Had to put up or shut up!
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What's your favorite piece of Unmatched art not drawn by you?
Heather: Ohh that's hard. I love every single Oliver Barrett Deck. The Bruce Lee deck is gorgeous, and I think that's the most I can narrow it down. Oliver is just amazing, I could look at their work forever. Huge huge fan.
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How does working on Unmatched differ from the many other board game projects you've worked on?
Heather: I think the baked-in emphasis on the art is the biggest difference. With other games, of course, shelf appeal is important. You want buyers to see the game and pick it and the art is part of that. But with Unmatched, the art has always been showcased from the beginning. It's just as important of an aspect of the game as the mechanics of the actual gameplay are.
Is there a particular character from Buffy or Teen Spirit that stands out in your mind?
Heather: Spike. Hands down. I have/had a huge crush on James Marsters since he first showed up on Buffy and I will tell you I took the most care with Spike when I was drawing him 🤣
What's your dream IP to draw for?
Heather: X-Files is absolutely #1 and then Rocky. I actually think a Rocky deck would be amazing, Rocky vs Bruce Lee?! Come ON! Also, the X-Files have such an endless treasure trove of characters and monsters to pull from, Fluke Man and Toombs vs Alice in Wonderland and Sinband?? I would be absolutely floored and pants-wettingly excited to work on either of those IPs in any way possible.
Zoe van Dijk
Artist for Battle of Legends Vol. 2 and Slings and Arrows
You've had the opportunity to illustrate for a pretty wide range of media; in what ways does board game illustration differ from the other forms of media you've worked on (comics, advertising, etc.)?
Zoe: Board game illustration has a lot of the same visual problems to solve as other media but in a much smaller canvas. Clarity of silhouettes, clarity of value structure, clarity of color palette -- you really have to make sure your drawing can scale down to a 2x2 inch square and remain not just legible but engaging and a fun piece of artwork to look at for the player.
Are there any rituals or routines you have to get into "work mode"?
Zoe: I'm a bit of an irregular illustrator in that I don't really keep a set "working hours" schedule or even specific days I work every week. I don't do 'warm ups' or any other ritual to get myself into work for the day. Having said that, I do think starting a new project is probably the hardest place to be. If I'm just resuming work from the day before, I can just sit down and pick up where I left off, but if I am at the very beginning of a new project, it takes some time to get into the groove of things. I usually open up everything I have on the project for a broad overview before I start breaking it down into an actionable sequence of events to get myself into 'work mode' in that type of scenario.
Do you play any board games, and if so what types of games do you tend to enjoy? If you play Unmatched, do you have a favorite character/map to play?
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Zoe: I love games of all types -- card, board, puzzles, word games like Scrabble, etc -- but I don't often have the time to play them as much as I'd like, especially given what a renaissance we've had in the past decade in terms of new and interesting board games. I am extremely behind on new games!! So I love a lot of the classics -- Risk, Settlers of Catan -- but I am also a big fan of Wingspan! I've only played two box sets from Unmatched -- BoL 1 and 2 -- but I really enjoyed the glass cannon aspect of Bloody Mary and her maneuverability.
How were you initially approached to work on Unmatched?
Zoe: Just out of the blue! Via inbox as it usually goes. I was given the option of BoL Vol 2 or a Marvel IP but I preferred the creative freedom of BoL and found the characters more interesting.
Did you have any familiarity/attachment to Achilles/Bloody Mary/Sun Wukong/Yennenga prior to working on Battle of Legends Vol. 2? If you did any research about these characters, are there specific books or sources you can cite for inspiration?
Zoe: As someone who was really interested in Greek mythology for much of my childhood I was familiar with Achilles, and Bloody Mary just via American culture, but both Sun Wukong and Yennenga were unknowns to me. I always take my due diligence very seriously any time I am drawing anything that exists outside of my own native culture, so yes I did a lot of research.
Sun Wukong and Yennenga were different case studies, as Sun Wukong is extremely present in Chinese culture and there are a multitude of contemporary iterations of his design, so part of researching his character was pulling apart what is canon and what is contemporary riffing. For Yennenga, I was looking at a lot of sculpture, textile and jewelry collections specific to the Dagomba and Mossi people from Museums, and asking myself questions like what materials were commonly used in their clothing, what was available to them for fabric dyes, was gold widely used in jewelry etc. The Metropolitan Museum and the Brooklyn Museum both have fairly robust collections available online. I'm sure my research was not perfect! But I did as much as I could in the time I had.
Between these characters, there are a few prominent cultures that are represented through Sun Wukong and Yennenga. Were there any guidelines/instructions provided by Restoration or the cultural advisor who advised for this set regarding the presentation of these characters?
Zoe: I inherited BoL Vol 2 after another artist, so a lot of the character designs were already semi-fleshed out. Restoration did have two cultural advisors, Calvin Wong Tze Loon and Lollita Koech, who helped me when I had questions. Other than general mood boards, there were no particular guidelines given to me, but I did spend some time checking the designs that were given to me against my own research and tweaking them as I went, both to make them more personal to me but also to align with cultural touchstones that were more accurate. In a game like Unmatched, I think it's equally important to be accurate but also to have fun with the concepts -- it's a game that has historical, mythical and pop-culture based beings all colliding in one arena, so it's up to the artist to both honor the core material but respectfully riff on it at the same time to make it feel contemporary enough that it fits into the overall Unmatched pantheon.
What were the "must do's" you felt you needed to represent in your art when conceptualizing any of these characters?
Zoe: This was my first board game, so I was establishing for the first time what that type of artwork looks like in my overall aesthetic and style as an artist. I could not necessarily do what I normally love to do, which is, for lack of a better phrase, to detail the living shit out of everything because there's just not the budget or time for that in card art. So instead I focused on the things that I do best -- interesting composition, value control and mood building -- and tried to distill them as much as possible into a format that can be digested into card art
Double-attacks are a type of card that's entirely unique to this set. How did you work on such involved art within the restricted space offered by the framework of cards?
Zoe: They were definitely challenging to ideate for, but communicating a lot of information in one image is something that I've done extensively for editorial illustration over the years, so it felt like a natural problem to solve. With cards, you are always up against size relationships -- smaller figures fit easier into the format but are less visually impactful, while extreme closeups are great for communicating emotion and mood but squeeze out important additional context information. It felt like a natural choice to get a little bit of the best of both worlds and use a zoom in and zoom out approach to insinuate action and movement while using the border between two actions as a way to fold in more conceptual storytelling aspects about each character.
Sun Wukong's spear can change shapes and sizes -- having him large on one side and smaller on the right invites you to imagine that reality in one image. Achilles' card features a chain being torn in half by his spear -- I was kind of playing around with the idea of the weakest link. I love reaching for visualizing puns and idioms as easy ways to communicate dense ideas quickly to a viewer.
One of the cards in Achilles' kit, Brothers in Arms, features what many view to be a reference to the "best handshake" meme from Predator. Was this reference intentional? If so, what inspired this reference?
Zoe: Hahaha it's 100% from the Predator II. I watch a lot of movies and I love inside jokes. It's two ripped guys celebrating their brotherhood!! I just wanted to bring some of that iconic 'okay, who's next energy' to my Greek battle boys.
A lot of your art for this set plays with perspective, whether it be the reflective nature of Bloody Mary's mirrors or the disguised identity of Achilles/Patroclus on particular cards. Can you talk a little about how you create such mesmerizing art in this way?
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Zoe: I think this comes from my love of film but also harkens back to my early love of comic book covers as a child. I didn't read the comics (lol), I just looked at the covers that my brother collected. I don't know, there are so many plots within plots and alternate storylines and multiverses that traditional Marvel/DC comics always felt too deep a pool with no ladder to get into reading. BUT, I loved the art and the engaging way that the characters were drawn at all angles. I intentionally bake this into my process now. I start with the concept and what I want to communicate to the viewer and how I'd like to communicate it -- Achilles screaming with two spears, for example -- and then I imagine myself a cinematographer and I move the camera around in my head to resketch the same scene from a more compelling angle.
Is there any one character that you enjoyed working on the most, and if so why?
Zoe: That's tough because each character had its own set of very fun problems to solve. Having said that, I think Bloody Mary was the most fun for me simply because I work primarily in a very commercial sphere most of the time and it's so rare that my art directors take all the guard rails off and really, truly let me loose into the fields of full blown horror gore. Her design is rather simple compared to the other characters in this set so I got to focus my time more on mood building and, well, blood. Lots of blooooood!!
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What's your favorite piece of Unmatched art not drawn by you?
Zoe: Oh man, tough question! There's a lot of incredible art in these sets! I think Oliver Barrett's "Snicker-Snack" for Alice's deck is just about as perfect as you can get. That entire deck is a real delight -- the colors, the combination of rendering and graphic elements, the silhouettes are all so immaculately executed.
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What advice would you give to someone who is illustrating board games for the first time?
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Zoe: Look at all the cards together, see how they work as a group. Are you drawing too many small silhouettes? Introduce some larger shapes and more close up drawings. Simplify your silhouettes. Alternate working zoomed in and zoomed out so you don't get lost in the sauce and spend 4 hours detailing something that ultimately doesn't read at scale.
What's your dream IP to draw for?
Zoe: As a lifelong fan of Frank "Worm Dad" Herbert's novels I'd love to draw some Dune art. Show me the dunes, baby!!!