TOP TRUMPS BATTLE MAT

TOP TRUMPS
BATTLE MAT

Brand Identity, Packaging & Game Design

Top Trumps Battle Mat is a head-to-head strategy game that takes the classic Top Trumps format and pushes it further. Players battle across five categories, deploy tokens to disrupt their opponent, and race to claim seven victories before the other side does. Fast, tactical and genuinely competitive.

My role covered the full visual development of the product: logo, packaging, mat design, tokens and all product visuals. The rules and gameplay were handed to me fully formed. Everything you see was built around them, with one clear creative goal: make it feel energetic, competitive and immediately readable as a head-to-head game.

Top Trumps Battle Mat is a
head-to-head strategy game that takes the classic Top Trumps format and pushes it further. Players battle across five categories, deploy tokens to disrupt their opponent, and race to claim seven victories before the other side does. Fast, tactical and genuinely competitive.

THE LOGO

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 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 PATTERN

The lightning bolt did not stay in the logo. It became the foundation of a repeating pattern used across the wider product range, interlocking bolts tiled diagonally and available across a range of colours and backgrounds, flexible enough to adapt to each edition while keeping the identity instantly recognisable.

THE MAT & TOKENS

Designing the mat was as much an exercise in information design as visual craft. Eleven card spaces, category labels, scoring zones, branding and legal copy all had to work within the confines of a single sheet of folded A4 card. Every element had to earn its place. The football pitch aesthetic on the World Football Stars edition does a lot of heavy lifting, grounding the gameplay in the theme while keeping the layout clear and instinctive to navigate mid-game.

The five strategy tokens follow the same principle. Each carries its own icon and football-themed name, giving players a quick visual reference for each power without needing to re-read the rules every time. Maximum clarity in minimum space, from the mat to the smallest token in the box.

THE PACKAGING

Each edition of Battle Mat is dressed to match its theme, with the packaging designed to reflect the world of that particular pack. The format stays bold and energetic on shelf, while the artwork shifts edition to edition. Bold imagery, dynamic composition and strong colour work together to communicate the competitive energy of the game before anyone has even opened the box.

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.

THE RESULT

The lightning bolt was never going to stay in the box, and off the mat, the possibilities were endless. As a graphic device it is bold enough to fill a bomber jacket lining, sharp enough to sit as an embroidered chest badge, and striking enough to carry anything from a snapback panel to a phone case to a collector's keyring. Whatever the application, it arrives with the same energy. It is the kind of mark that does not just identify a brand. It becomes one.

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.