Have Mercy
Programs Used | Procreate, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator
Have Mercy is a satire-based board game that targets the darker nature of the catholic church and its community.
Play as one of the four church members, all who hold a secret for wanting to leave the church. Your objective is to successfully escape the catholic church and its community while dodging emotional manipulation, personal guilt & false senses of security to get you to stay.
Game Play Basics:
Each turn you roll a die to move forward.
Land on a darker space and you pick up a card - completing your turn by doing whatever lies on the card.
The cards can move you forward, backward, send you to different spaces on the board, and be your biggest advantage and disadvantage towards other players.
Be the first to get to the end of the board to complete the game and win.
The game is designed to use your guilt and the personal bias’ of others to work against you
Have Mercy focus’ on catholic guilt
This game draws upon the diverse experiences of many individuals, weaving them into three tiers of guilt (board, characters, and cards) to form the game.
The game is meant to be light and humorous. It’s a heavy topic but it doesn’t need a heavy execution. So all design aspects take this approach. Every aspect of the board is meant to be a visually humorous play on representations of guilt within Catholicism.
The three icons you can visit on the board all represent physical things that invoke guilt within catholicism
Baptismal: original sin, guilty since birth
Confessional Booth: the need to always seek forgiveness, you must always be guilty of SOMETHING
Donation Basket (Mob Boss Nun): financial guilt, pressure/expectations to give more than you can afford
The Church: churches are meant to make you feel small and insignificant- as this one looms over the board
This leads us to the next tier. The characters you play as. You choose the character you’ll play for the game by picking a character card. Each character card consists of your backstory and your consequence for your “Judgment Day”. A personalized consequence to your character that sends you back to start if you pull the Judgment Day card.
Assigning a face to the issues, make things feel more real. Hence the characters and their heartbreaking backstories.
They all hit topics of guilt and alienation that cause people to leave the church.
The last tier of guilt targets you, the player. The cards of this game are meant to target your personal choices and life, to cause YOU guilt. Cards can move you forward, backward, send you to different spaces on the board, and be your biggest advantage and disadvantage towards other players.
But it’s most likely your biggest disadvantage, unless you are the perfect human in the eyes of God. Which you are, aren't you?
