by Katerina Xerovasila

World Order, much like Hegemony, is not what you'd call a simple game. It's a simulation of how the real world actually works, translated into a tabletop game. A complex system of interconnected parts that all need to work together to give players the educational but actually fun experience the designers had in mind. Graphic design follows the same rule. The visuals need to be coherent, logical, immersive, intuitive, and somewhere in there, nice to look at too. That's an overwhelming thought to have at the start of a project. I wouldn’t recommend it but I had it anyway.

It wasn't the first time either. Hegemony taught me that you can't hold an entire complex system in your head at once and still get anything done. So this time I took it one piece at a time.

Setting the Direction
Before graphic design even started, the game designers already knew what they wanted thematically and (to a degree) mechanically. Everything else got decided along the way, starting with setting the overall visual direction. World Order simulates international relations and geopolitics, the players are actual countries, the board is an actual map of the world. So the direction was obvious: realism, in both illustration and graphics. No fantasy environment. No WWII history game vibes. It happens now, and the theme doesn't leave much room for playful or comic style imagery either.

That left us with a short list of tools and a long list of things we weren’t allowed to touch. The real challenge was making it look good, with academic weight, without looking like it fell out of a university textbook on international relations. "Serious but not boring" is a narrower lane than it sounds.

Cover Art & Logo
Once we had the thematic direction, cover art came next, and it took more passes than I'd like to admit before it felt right. The logo was the opposite kind of problem. For both Hegemony and World Order we ended up landing on less is more. In both Hegemony and World Order it is the words and taglines that do all the heavy-lifting.

The Map
Then came the big one. The biggest piece of table presence in the whole game. THE MAP, always in capitals in my head.

It's the clearest thematic image the game has, and it also has to physically hold everything: all the regions, the scoring system, the country card marketplace, the turn order track, the scoring track, the round track, army markers that actually have to fit inside their own regions. All that without really obstructing the actual map, so the players can get a feel of how a country’s geographical position plays in the big picture. No pressure.

Each region needed its own clear color, one that wouldn't get confused with its neighbors and wouldn't clash with any player's flag colors. Sounds simple until you actually try to assign four superpowers a color each. China had to be red, because, well, its flag. That took red off the table for the USA, so the USA got blue, the other color on its own flag. Which meant the EU, whose flag is mostly blue, couldn't have blue either, so it got yellow. Then Russia showed up with a flag that's red, white, and blue, all of it already spoken for, leaving white as the only option standing. Four superpowers, one game of musical chairs.

Once the players were sorted we still had seven regions left needing distinct, appropriate colors that didn't clash with any of that. The Americas got a deep orange, MENA got green, and so on down the line. Country card colors matched their regions too, so once a card appears on the marketplace on the board, you can tell at a glance where it belongs.

We also had to decide between a light board and a dark board, the shape and size of the board (table real estate is something we take seriously). None of these is a small decision; change one and you get a whole new table feel of the game.


Player Boards
Player boards come right after the game board in importance. In World Order each one reflects a Superpower’s internal organization and so needed to hold a lot of information arranged logically and clearly. They're also dual layered, which sounds fine until you're the one accounting for every factory instruction that comes with dual layering. Seeing the more primitive ones again… well it brings up a lot of feelings!

Cards
Next, the cards. Some illustrated, some not, but the challenge on all of them is the same: fit every piece of text and icon somewhere the player can find it instantly, and still make it look good. Gameplay details that would seem insignificant are actually very important. For example when a player holds the cards in their hand like a fan, are all the important details and icons (value, ability etc.) visible at once? That’s where the game designer’s experience comes in handy! We went through a lot of versions here. Several looked genuinely nice but were also nowhere near the academic tone we were aiming for. Looking good and being correct turned out to be two different jobs.

Ability Cards

Country Cards
Iconography
At some point in every project we hit the same fork: what becomes an icon, and what gets spelled out. Icons are basically tiny logos. They have to be clear both in meaning and appearance, even at the smallest possible scale, or they haven't done their one job. Some graduate into markers and tokens, like the tanks, which get a special place on the board and become part of the actual action instead of just sitting there!


Coins
One of the trickiest components to get right was the coins. Our first attempts leaned into a more vintage aesthetic, the kind of "old money" look that's a natural instinct for coin design. It looked good in isolation, but it clashed with everything else we were building: World Order is a modern simulation, and the coins needed to feel like they belonged in the same world as the rest of the components.

What we actually wanted was something much more literal: coins clean and precise enough that you could almost mistake them for real currency, like crisp architectural depictions, no ornamentation getting in the way of legibility. But getting that level of realism in flat vector art has real limits, because coins have depth, light, relief. So I taught myself Blender, a program I had almost no experience with, specifically to get the embossed, dimensional look I couldn't achieve in Illustrator and of course produce the actual files that the factory could use for production. I was fully expecting a steep learning curve, but it turned out to be far more approachable than I feared. Quite soon, I had a workflow that worked.


The nicest confirmation came after the game was out: a backer commented that the coins looked so realistic they could almost pass for real currency, which was exactly the goal from day one.

The Part Nobody Sees
The visual design process, all of the above, is roughly 20% of the game's total production timeline. Most of the big decisions land early. We generally know what we like when we see it, and very little changes drastically after that. What does happen, over and over, is tweaking and correcting after every playtest, for the next one.

We also produce prototypes early, first in house, then at the factory, which is the real test of how everything looks once it's actually printed rather than on a screen. Those prototypes go to expos and reviewers, so getting them right matters well beyond our own approval.

The most serious stretch of the whole job is file prep, for the factory and for localization both. Everything has to be spotless, because mistakes at this stage don't stay small. Then there's the single most stressful moment in the entire process: giving the final go ahead to the factory for mass production. No more revisions. No more "let's just tweak this one thing." It's happening now.

Concepts
And just when you thought you were done, well, you weren't. There was a whole book left to produce. World Order Concepts, the theoretical backbone of the entire game, in both softcover and hardcover. Not a rulebook, not a component, a real book, the kind you'd expect to find a bibliography in (which you will). Our academics team put a huge amount of work into it, because it's the part that actually proves the point behind both of our games: that something can be properly educational and still be fun to sit down and play. The board and the cards teach you by playing. Concepts is there for the people who finish a game and want to know how and why any of it actually works that way in real life.


The best moment comes much later. People get the game in their hands, and they love it, or they hate it, and either way it becomes something they actually talk about. Forum threads, reviews, arguments about whether a rule makes sense or a color is confusing. You made a thing and now it exists outside of you, which is a strange feeling the first few times it happens.

And then there are the expos. We go present and sell the game ourselves, face to face, at a table, watching people pick up a card or look at the board for the first time with no idea what to expect. You get instant, unfiltered reactions there in a way a review never gives you. Someone squints at an icon and you watch, in real time, whether it works or not. It's the most exposed part of the whole job, and also the part that makes the other 95% feel like it was worth doing.