Board Game: Kaiju Rumble
Kaiju Rumble is a board game I created in my board game class on Fall 2024. It is a fighting game where players selected their kaiju and cards. Each player starts off by rampaging throughout the city and gather enough energy. Soon the player will battle the opposing Kaiju and see who will reign supreme as the alpha.
Doing this project was a lot of fun, I created my own original Kaijus, buildings, game mat, and playing cards. I worked very hard on it and was able to get it made in real life by ordering it on BoardGameMaker.
Inspiration on Kaiju
My inspiration on making Kaiju Rumble was based on the giant monster movies I watched; such as Godzilla, Gamera, Ultraman, and many other films. These were my favorite from when I was 10 years old. I started watching many films and I always wanted to see the companies who made them. Kaiju Rumble is a game for me to create some of my original Kaiju.
Kaiju Designs
During the first few weeks of working on my board game, I focused on creating character designs and made my very own Kaiju. The first one was a fire dinosaur Kaiju I named, Pyrosaurus Rex. The second Kaiju was a jellyfish-like Kaiju named Onikaro. Its design is a mixture of a jellyfish with octopus tentacles, and the head has a jelly-like fish with spikes similar to a pufferfish. The third Kaiju is named Byyako, after the mythological Japanese tiger. The design is a white tiger standing bipedal with wrist blades and spike shoulders. It is also based on a creature I saw in my childhood anime. The fourth and final Kaiju I made was called Rosvine. It is a female, plant-like humanoid creature with a fly trap in one arm and a whip in the other.
Then I created the design for the Board Mat and several buildings. I first created the board mat on Adobe Illustrator. It was very difficult to create as I had to create the curves for each shape and match the angles. The hardest one was making the river as I was having trouble matching each of sides to fit. After I got some advice from my professor, I was able to complete it. For the building designs, I used Illustrator on my structures. I wanted each of them to be different, where some are a business building, a skyscraper, a hotel, an apartment, and a warehouse. I even used different colors to help make them more unique.
For the card designs, I started creating backgrounds for each of them. Then I place the name of the kaiju’s at the top and the lore description at the bottom. The category shows how dangerous the Kaiju are, similar to the categories for storms. The heart at the left of the card shows the number of health it has, and the right side shows the attacking power they have. I also worked on the back cover for the card, and I worked on each attack and defense card to make my game more playable.
Kaiju Rumble Cards
Box Cover
After I finished with the building and mat design. I started working on the box cover art on the front, back, and sides. The first cover of the art was silhouettes of the Kaiju terrorizing a city in flames. The silhouettes, buildings, flames, and smoke were all made on Procreate. The back cover’s background is all black, with the title on top and the cards on the right side. The left side describes a summary of what’s going on and has a list of what is inside of the box. Each of the sides has the silhouette of the current Kaiju in a city and has short text about each of the Kaiju.
