Emma Higgins – Game Designer

Designer, Artist

October 2023

Made by: Emma Higgins, Urvi Bhuwania, Xander Beaky, and Xander DiGiovanni

Limb from Limb is a board game about building a unique Frankenstein creature by attaching zany limb cards to your monster, which starts out as just a rolling head. Each monster produces its own type of resource (blood, flesh, neurons, and ectoplasm) by killing and harvesting villagers on the map. Players must then trade amongst each other the resources they need to attach new limbs to their creature. Each limb grants a new ability that speeds up the collection process or makes your monster stronger. Finally, the players storm the castle in the center of the map, and then fight each other for the ORB OF CONQUERING.

Because I was the artist for Limb from Limb, I had to come up with an art style that fit with both the theme of the game and my lack of knowledge on digital art. Thus, I was able to come up with a sketchy mad scientist style which allowed me to work in pen and gave the game a sense of wackiness. I also developed a sense of empathy for game artists, since doing art for a ton of different cards is hard work.

Furthermore, Limb from Limb made me keenly aware of how feedback loops work. Initial playtests ended with the amount of certain resources going off the charts, while others were impossible to acquire. Instead of having various rarities of resources, we leaned into something timelessly fun—wheeling and dealing with your friends, making players each generate one type of resource and trade with each other. We also were forced to make certain limbs much more expensive, and tone down the effectiveness of others.