In this board game art interview, I’m speaking to Judson Cowan, a designer, artist, and publisher whose work brings the Deep Regrets artwork, filled me with both excitement and terror.

About five years ago, I backed a game on Kickstarter called Hideous Abominations. In the game, you are presented with a carnival of body parts and, as a mad scientist, are tasked with combining them to create your own monsters. I love a macabre theme, but what drew me in was the playful artwork.

Today’s guest designed and illustrated Hideous Abominations, and he’s back with a brand new game! Here’s Judson to shed light on the Deep Regrets art and game design!

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Deep regrets board game on the table surrounded by fishing equipment

Thanks for joining us, Judson! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?

Thanks for having me! I am all over the place. Professionally and mentally. Obviously, I’m a board game designer, but that’s been new to me in the last four years. I’m a musician, an illustrator, a graphic designer, a photographer, a filmmaker, a gamer, a climber, a horror fanatic - I like being able to do and try everything (except sports, I could not give two shits about sports).

Weirdly, I’ve never really liked calling myself any of those things. I’m just a person who does things; I do some things more than others. I feel like avoiding being put into a specific bucket is an important part of my personal brand.

By Tktru - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12222465 — “I once designed a blimp for Conan O’Brien.”

BORING RECAP OF CAREER: I’m originally from the States and studied design and photography at uni in North Carolina. I worked for about a decade in the ad industry as an art director in Atlanta, Georgia. I once designed a blimp for Conan O’Brien. I’ve always had a side hustle of doing music for commercials and games, most notably Ben10 and Rogue Legacy, respectively.

And I’ve made a name for myself in the Soulsborne community doing maps and fan art of the video game Dark Souls. Before I moved into board game design, I spent about a decade in-house at Skyscanner, where I was a creative director and people manager.

Deep Regrets board game illustration, showing a weather worn fisherman holding a fishing spear in front of a fireplace and a wall displaying his catch

Forgive an obvious question, but what comes first, theme or mechanics?

Theme and mechanics are so intrinsically linked I have trouble considering them individually. Take Deep Regrets, for example: the first time I thought about it, I already knew that I wanted a horror fishing game that featured heavy push-your-luck mechanics, dice used for strength, multiple depths and shoals, and a strong focus on exploration and discovery.

I developed the visual style, the theme, and the gameplay all simultaneously. I was even thinking about what the trailer, marketing, and box would all look like and how they would tie together the first day I started working on the game – I’m designing an end-to-end experience, not just a game. So, what comes first? The experience comes first. And theme and mechanics both serve the experience.

There’s a Maya Angelou quote I really like:

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

— Maya Angelou

That’s how I think designing games should be approached: how do I want to make people feel? And how do I use theming and mechanics to create those emotions?

What is your attraction to SPOOKY STUFF when it comes to theme?

I’m just a SPOOKY GUY, I guess! I’ve always been obsessed with spooky stuff. I grew up making haunted houses for trick-or-treaters in my front yard. I was weaned on Scooby-Doo, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. And I’ve honestly just never weaned off. All my favorite things are horror - movies, books, games.

I actually spent a season moonlighting at Netherworld in Atlanta, scaring people professionally. I once scared the rapper Bow Wow! He always brings his crew through the haunt every year.

The first game I designed was about building and running your own haunted attraction called Fright House. It’s a forever project that may never be finished, but I really hope to come back to it at some point; it’s very close to my heart!

Deep Regrets artwork. A character is biting off the head of a fish while fighting an octopus.

You are the designer, graphic designer, and illustrator of your games. What are the advantages of doing it all?

There are a few advantages, but I think the most important one is velocity. Because I don’t have many external dependencies, I can move very quickly. I know what I’m trying to achieve, and I can get there very quickly because I’m not waiting on someone else to pass back design/art/development work.

The other key one is control. Coming back to this idea of crafting experiences, being able to control every aspect of that experience provides a very “auteur” approach. I hope that you can feel a lot more of my personality in my games than you might in games made by larger teams since I’m very carefully controlling every aspect of it.

The downsides are equally important: you don’t have a team to bounce ideas off of, you work in relative isolation, and you’re a huge bottleneck for your projects. I’ve tried to balance these negatives a bit by moving into a shared office space with other board game designers, so I have people working in the same discipline nearby at all times to chat with and get support from!

As a one-person studio, how important is playtesting and feedback?

I learned the importance of user research and feedback in my corporate life, and I brought that mentality with me to board game design. Here, user research is just playtesting, and it’s critical to making good games.

You can always tell when a game didn’t go through the proper amount of testing or was only tested by close friends and family who were too polite to give it the proper dressing-down it required.

I have a dedicated group of playtesters that I trust and work with a lot, but I also try to attend meetups and go to board game cafes and such to play with people I don’t know. Plus, looking for localisation partners gives a lot of very diverse feedback from very different cultures as publishers play your game to see if it's a good fit for their catalogue.

It’s important to get a variety of perspectives and consider how you’ll implement that feedback into your game.

In an early version of the game, madness was a universal scale - it did the same things, but it affected all players unilaterally. This was quite cool because it meant you could put pressure on other players and decrease the value of their fish. The downside was that Regrets didn’t do much. They drove up the global madness when acquired, but the only other effect they had was to force the player with the most to lose their most valuable fish.

In playtesting, the feedback I got was that Regret cards felt meaningless and extraneous. Ultimately, that feedback encouraged me to part with the idea of a global madness track in favor of individual player madness tracks. I lost a bit of “take-that” in favor of greater player agency and greater thematic integration of the Regret concept, and the game is much stronger for it!

In your opinion, what are the crucial elements of good graphic design?

If you’re familiar with Dieter Rams, the German industrial designer, he has a philosophy I really like: as little design as possible. Design serves a function, and extraneous design elements should be removed wherever possible.

When he was working, he had a very clean, minimalist approach. That approach is not correct for (most) board games. The “as possible” quantifier in the “as little design as possible” is super important - a lot more elements are required in board game designs to help with comprehension, engagement, and entertainment.

Often, things that serve a strictly aesthetic purpose ARE necessary in designing board games because, again, you’re designing an experience, and those design elements can enhance that experience. That’s still essential design.

I do think there’s a balance to be struck. I think a lot of games get overly decorative and detailed and it starts to be a bit like typing in all caps. An individual card might look nice when viewed up close, but the table viewed from afar starts to look like a bowl of rocks. There’s no discernable focal point. I wish more designers considered the entire board state as one composition when designing.

Squint at a photo of Everdell, then squint at a photo of Brass Birmingham. Both have strong illustration and design elements, but Everdell considered how it would be viewed at a distance, and Brass did not.

Everdell is recognisable from across the room because of its contrasty elements and unique forms - everything works beautifully together and stands apart from one another. Let’s just ignore the big annoying cardboard tree, which is a design decision that I think Dieter Rams would absolutely chuck in the furnace. It actively worsens the gaming experience and is just there as a gimmick. That’s not essential design.

What is your method for creating art? Are you digital or analog?

I love physical media and I love working with my hands. All of my illustrations start in ink. I do colour digitally on an iPad in Procreate, but I try to keep a tangible hand-touched element to each one.

I think working in ink forces a nice acceptance of imperfection. Watching people draw on an iPad is fascinating because they’ll draw and erase a line 10 times before they get one they like. With ink, you get one shot. You have to commit.

I like the way that forces you to accept the decision your hand made and move on instead of striving for some fictional perfection.

You can always redraw but I generally try to avoid this as much as possible. I might redo my pencils a few times before I get an outline I’m happy with, but once I move to ink, I usually stick with my first pass, except in rare circumstances. Another creative philosophy I really like is Miles Davis: he thought spontaneity and expression were more important than perfection.

I also like that it creates physical artifacts. I have all these folders of ink drawings and I’ve started selling them as part of my Kickstarters and on my site. That really resonates with people! Owning a physical part of a game’s creation process is something people find a lot of value in!

Deep Regrets features a monstrous deck of creatures. Where did the inspiration come from for the over 100 unique fish in the game?

50% of them are real things, it’s an even split of fair (real) and foul (fake) fish. I did a tremendous amount of research to find a mix of interesting fish and to learn about their anatomy and behaviour to help inform their mechanics.

I think my office mates got tired of me saying things like “did you know Pacific Islanders used to sacrifice Giant Trevally in place of humans?” or “did you know garfish have green skeletons??”

There are some really, really weird things in the ocean. One of the most difficult parts of filling my fictional sea with life was coming up with fake fish that were more terrifying or bizarre than the real fish. I wound up utilising the uncanny valley quite a bit! Making fish more human-like made them far more disturbing. Lots of fingers, big white eyeballs, that sort of thing.

In fact, one of the most disturbing fish in the game is the “human” you can catch at depth III. It just makes no sense that he’s down there, and that’s terrifying. And you can eat him to refresh the dice.

Do you have a favorite piece of art you created for Deep Regrets?

I just love Frod. He’s the first character I designed and he encapsulates the feel of the game so well. Lovecraft, but goofy.

Scooby and the gang investigate Innsmouth. I love him so much that he became the Automa opponent in the upcoming Buttonshy version of the game Shallow Regrets.

Any advice for someone considering creating and publishing their own game?

Just f***ing go for it. There’s plenty of good advice I could give you, but I’m a big believer in letting people make their own mistakes and learn from them. You won’t nail it on the first try, you’ll struggle, you’ll stumble along the way, but all of that will craft you into something interesting, and you’ll make better games for it.

What are you reading, listening to, or looking at to fuel your work?

I’m a big horror film fan, I probably pull the majority of my inspiration from that world. One that really set my imagination ablaze was Annihilation, so much so that I watched about four times and then bought and read the entire Southern Reach trilogy because I was hungry to explore more of that absolutely bizarre world. I need to pick up the fourth book!

Some of my favorite horror flicks from the last few years are, in no particular order, When Evil Lurks, The Vourdalak, Late Night with the Devil, Long Legs, In a Violent Nature, Barbarian, Oddity, and Hold Your Breath (full transparency, I did the credits for that one).