JR Honeycutt’s North South East Quest is the third and final game of our upcoming Kickstarter campaign, sharing the stage with Smoke & Mirrors and Fever Chill. It’s a direction-based storytelling game where one player sets the group out on an adventure and watches, listens and intakes everything, while the group tries to meet his/her goals, or hopes, or dreams. It has a very whimsical feel to it and I was on a search for whimsical art to match.

Lately, I’ve been working with artists that I’ve worked with before. It’s great to come back to the ones you know, but for this, I wanted something new. Something different. I did the usual Deviant Art scrub, and without much luck I headed over to the BoardGameGeek forums looking for art for the first time. Finding someone interested in boardgames could be a big plus as it’s much easier to jump right into formatting talk, and hopefully they’ll have a better idea of how things work and apply that to their illustrations.

At BGG I found Embla Vigfúsdóttir who was looking to work on board games, and one look at her site and I knew that I found the artist for NSEQ (we use lots of acronyms here at Button Shy). Her art was as whimsical as it gets and felt like adventure right from the start. As a bonus, she’s made and worked on a lot of small independent game projects, so it was a very good fit.

It’s been a few weeks since we first chatted and the art is starting to come in, so I want to share a few pieces here. In NSEQ players receive two cards before choosing the direction they would like to travel. The cards feature a method of transportation and a tone / feeling for the story. 

Here's an idea of what to expect.

Join us on August 16th for the Kickstarter campaign for Smoke & Mirrors, North South East Quest and Fever Chill!