ENGLISH HERITAGE RISK

Packaging, Game Design, Illustration, Art Direction

This project had everything. From packaging and game design to illustration, art direction, and even dragons.

English Heritage Risk began life as a visual update to an existing game, but when the client saw an early board concept, they made the call to relaunch the whole thing from scratch.
I led the client relationship directly throughout, shaping the creative direction,
managing expectations, and keeping everything moving against a hard deadline
tied to factory capacity and holiday shutdown.

When the scope expanded, we had very little room to push the schedule. Getting that conversation right, keeping the client excited while being clear about the constraints, was as important as the design work itself.

This was my final project at Winning Moves, and I was determined to see it land exactly as it should.

This project had everything. From packaging and game design to illustration, art direction, and even dragons.

English Heritage Risk began life as a visual update to an existing game, but when the client saw an early board concept, they made the call to relaunch the whole thing from scratch.
I led the client relationship directly throughout, shaping the creative direction, managing expectations, and keeping everything moving against a hard deadline
tied to factory capacity and holiday shutdown.

This was my final project at Winning Moves, and I was determined to see it land exactly as it should.

This project had everything. From packaging and game design to illustration,
art direction, and even dragons.

English Heritage Risk began life as a visual update to an existing game, but when the client saw an early board concept, they made the call to relaunch the whole thing from scratch.
I led the client relationship directly throughout, shaping the creative direction, managing expectations, and keeping everything moving against a hard deadline tied to factory capacity and holiday shutdown.

When the scope expanded,
we had very little room to
push the schedule. Getting that conversation right, keeping the client excited while being
clear about the constraints,
was as important as the design work itself.

This was my final project at Winning Moves, and I was determined to see it land exactly as it should.

CLIENT & PROJECT MANAGEMENT

I led the client relationship directly throughout this project, working with my contact at English Heritage to shape the creative direction, manage expectations around what was and wasn't achievable, and keep everything moving against a hard deadline tied to factory capacity and holiday shutdown. When the scope expanded into a full relaunch, we had very little room to push the schedule. Getting that conversation right, keeping the client excited while being clear about the constraints, was as important as the design work itself.

The wordmark leans into bold, chunky letterforms with a street-art quality, confident and a little confrontational, which felt right for something built around rivalry and competition.

At the centre of the logo sits a lightning bolt, splitting BATTLE from MAT with a single jagged strike. It creates instant energy and suggests the clash at the heart of the game, while also solving a practical problem: creating a natural break between two words of different visual weight.
The bolt sits perfectly in the space between the TT in BATTLE and the MA in MAT. The red to orange gradient on BATTLE fading into the blue of MAT reinforces the red team versus blue team dynamic, that classic shorthand for two sides going head to head.

The single colour executions strip everything back to the essential form, making sure the logo works cleanly across one-colour print processes and any application where colour is not available.

THE BOARD

The gameboard is the centrepiece of the whole project, and I illustrated it entirely from scratch. England is divided into five colour-coded territories: North, Midlands, East Anglia, South East, and West Country, each packed with historically significant landmarks.

Every location on the board had to meet a strict criterion: the site needed to date from at least the Middle Ages, if not earlier, and had to be either owned by English Heritage or freely accessible without being privately managed. That meant deep research across all five regions, cross-referencing sites, dates, and ownership before a single line was drawn.

The result is a board full of real history, from Dunstanburgh and Carlisle in the North, through Kenilworth and Nottingham in the Midlands, down to Tintagel and the Scilly Isles in the West Country. Each territory has its own visual character, with illustrated castles, ruins, and landmarks sitting within colour-coded regions defined by bold black borders.

The creatures scattered across the board are rooted in local legend, each one tied to the area it guards. A kraken drags a ship into the deep in the North Sea, sea monsters lurk in the Irish Sea, a griffin stalks the Midlands, and a dragon coils in the East. There were more in earlier versions, cut as the deadline closed in, but the ones that made it through feel exactly right: genuine folklore woven into the geography of the game.

A Middle Ages timeline tracker runs down the left edge of the board, and a detailed map key sits in the upper right. The whole thing feels like an illuminated medieval map brought to life.

BOX ARTWORK & COVER ILLUSTRATION

The box front carries a sweeping battle illustration: four mounted knights in the foreground representing the game's armies, with clashing medieval forces filling the background on both sides. On the right, a Viking raider charges with axe raised. On the left, a Norman knight in full heraldic dress leads the charge. In the background, the board itself is visible beneath the armies, tying the cover art directly to the game inside.

The back of the box features the full board laid out in a product shot, with the armoured knight from the cover standing guard to the right, bold, imposing, and keeping watch over the whole battlefield.

No project is complete without a little mythology. Somewhere on the box lid and rules montage, a familiar-looking Viking raider charges into battle: red beard, fur cloak, axe in hand, and a sleeve of Norse tattoos. That's me. Possibly my finest acting work to date.

CARD ARTWORK

With the board locked in, the illustrative assets needed to carry across the entire card suite. Territory Cards feature each location's illustrated shape set against a ghosted map backdrop, colour-coded by region and finished with a heraldic banner. Quest Cards give players objectives tied to specific territories, with the location rendered in full and the reward clearly called out. Power Cards put the knights front and centre, armoured figures rendered in the same illustrative style as the board and box, each one carrying the weight of the medieval world we'd built.

Given the scale of what we were producing against the timeline, we developed a practical and considered solution. Working from a combination of photographic assets provided from the client's 2017 archive and newer images my contact sourced from their library, I used AI tools to recreate and extend my own illustrative style across the card illustrations. The figures, horses, knights, and armoured warriors across the deck all feel consistent with the hand-drawn board and box art, maintaining a unified visual world across every touchpoint.

It was an approach I took thoughtfully and with full awareness of the craft involved. The priority was delivering a cohesive, high-quality product on time, and that's exactly what we did.

Battle Mat is a genuinely versatile product, a game format that can be dressed in any Top Trumps theme and feel completely at home. The visual system I built around it is flexible enough to travel across editions while keeping a consistent, high-energy identity. Designed to compete on shelf and deliver on the table.

3D TOKEN RENDERS

The physical plastic tokens from the original 2017 edition presented a problem: the only reference photography we had was too poor in quality to use in new print materials. Rather than compromise on the visuals, I tracked down physical samples, photographed them, and used AI tools to generate faithful 3D sculpts from those references. I then converted those sculpts to STL files using an online tool, which gave me full control over lighting, angle, and detail in the final renders.

The result was a set of crisp, highly detailed token visuals: infantry soldiers, cavalry knights, and a siege catapult, that could be used at any scale across packaging, cards, and marketing materials.

The identity travels brilliantly across every touchpoint. On packaging, the pattern wraps each product as a bold graphic band while the monogram anchors the front cleanly on black. Each application feels part of the same family, each with its own energy, each unmistakably Mama Kongo.

Clothing and merch is where the pattern really gets to breathe. Swept across sleeves, wrapped around uniforms, printed on the things people actually want to wear, it turns anyone representing the brand into a walking embodiment of it.

In a food market or festival environment, the identity scales up and commands the space. Bold, immersive and impossible to miss, it draws people in before they have even seen the menu.

Mama Kongo now has an identity as rich and layered as the food it serves. Bold, warm, and impossible to ignore.

THE RESULT

English Heritage Risk was delivered on time, on brief, and to a standard the client absolutely loved. They were over the moon. The project manager and sales team were equally delighted, and for me personally, it was the perfect way to close a chapter: going out on a project that tested every skill I had, from client management and art direction to illustration, research, and creative problem-solving under real pressure.

It's the kind of project that reminds you why you do this.

In a food market or festival environment, the identity scales up and commands the space. Bold, immersive and impossible to miss, it draws people in before they have even seen the menu.

Mama Kongo now has an identity as rich and layered as the food it serves. Bold, warm, and impossible to ignore.