Crafting the Perfect Board

The UI Journey Behind Steam Cities

🏙 The UI Journey Behind Steam Cities

Designing a board game isn’t just about mechanics or theme — it’s also about how it feels on the table. The board is the heartbeat of the experience, and when it comes to user interface (UI) design, the smallest detail can make or break immersion.

When we started designing Steam Cities, we didn’t just draw a board and call it done. What you see in the images above represents months of iteration — countless versions tested, adjusted, scrapped, and reborn. Every icon, track, and department layout went through multiple redesigns until it communicated clearly, supported gameplay flow, and felt right.

🎨 What We Learned About Board Game UI

1. Clarity First, Style Second

It’s tempting to chase a beautiful aesthetic early, but clarity must come first. Players should know at a glance what each area does. Once functionality works, you can refine the visual identity around it.

In our early prototypes, we leaned heavily on visual flair and quickly learned that too much texture or shadow made information harder to read under warm table light. Even worse, it disrupted the flow of upgrades, if something sits awkwardly in the middle of the board, the player’s mental path breaks. Clarity guides intuition; style decorates it.

2. Use Space Intelligently

Every square centimeter counts. The best UI feels natural, not crowded. In early builds, our departments were beautifully detailed but visually overwhelming. Over time, we opened breathing space, added clear areas for player pieces, and built a strong information hierarchy.

This is where a principle borrowed from web design helped us immensely: the rule of seven.
Just like a website shouldn’t overwhelm visitors with more than seven main menu items, a game board shouldn’t overwhelm players with more than seven major sections or action clusters. Beyond that number, cognitive load spikes, players hesitate, forget, or misread.
In Steam Cities, this led us to group everything into four clear “Departments” instead of scattering information everywhere. The result? Faster understanding, less eye fatigue, and smoother decision-making.

3. Consistency Is King

We standardized icon placement, token shapes, and alignment. Once a player recognizes a pattern like where “cost” or “reward” appears, they stop reading and start playing.

At the beginning, we didn’t even know which icons to use, or whether some mechanics needed icons at all. Many changed when the artwork phase began. But once the system of symbols matured, we applied it across every board, card, and reference sheet. This consistency became the invisible glue that held the entire experience together.

4. Iterate Visibly

Each iteration of the Steam Cities city board evolved like a living organism. We gathered feedback from Discord, conventions, and playtest sessions, adjusting everything from resource icons to upgrade flow.

It’s crucial to collect impressions not only from seasoned players but also from newcomers, even people who rarely play board games. They show you where intuition fails. And don’t forget inclusivity: visually impaired players, including those with colour-blindness, must be able to distinguish icons and colours easily. Good UI design doesn’t exclude anyone; it guides everyone.

⚙️ The Iteration Loop

Sketch & Prototype: Start ugly. Print in black and white. Focus on flow, not looks.
Playtest & Observe: Don’t explain, just watch. Confusion is your best teacher.
Simplify & Align: Remove one element per iteration. If something can be merged or implied, do it.
Visual Pass: Once everything works, then make it beautiful, never at the cost of usability.

Each version of the Steam Cities board became more readable and intuitive. What began as a dense control panel turned into a clean, balanced city interface where each department has its own logic yet feels part of a unified whole.

🧭 Final Thought

UI design in board games is invisible when it works and painfully obvious when it doesn’t. It’s not just about beauty it’s about communication. A good UI whispers the rules to the players without saying a word.

We’re still refining ours, and every piece of feedback from playtesters brings us closer to that perfect balance between form and function.

If you love this kind of behind-the-scenes look, join our Discord or become part of our Patreon tiers to help shape the next iteration of Steam Cities. Every comment, vote, and discussion helps us craft a better experience for everyone.