Buy the Rights
Brand identity, illustration, and packaging design for Buy the Rights, a party game built around pitching ridiculous movies.
The Movie Pitching Party Game
Buy the Rights is a party game built around pitching terrible movies. Four decks — genre, descriptor, hero, and plot — combine into prompts like Kung Fu Cat Lady or Superhero Elvis Impersonator, and players have to sell the idea to whoever is playing Producer. Literally Wizards already had a working prototype and successful Kickstarter, but the homemade version needed a visual identity that could carry the joke.
I was brought in to turn that prototype into a finished game, designing the logo, four card decks, character illustrations, play money, and packaging. The tone mattered as much as the design: if the game looked too serious, people might play it seriously. I built a bright, loose cartoon system that gave players permission to be ridiculous before they ever read the rules.
CLIENT
Literally Wizards
STUDIO
Weirdo Works\
YEAR
2016
MY ROLE
Art Direction, Brand Identity, Illustration, Packaging Design
DELIVERABLES
Logo, Card Decks, Character Illustration, Play Money, Packaging
RESULTS
Kickstarter prototype developed into a fully produced game
AWARDS
Major Fun Award — Fun & Play Value
Creating a Card Game for All Film Lovers
A Pitch–Perfect Party Game Design
The game only works if people feel comfortable making fools of themselves, so the visual direction needed to set that expectation right away. I built the identity around loose cartoon characters, bright colors, and a whole vocabulary of movie-making icons — cameras, clapperboards, spotlights, film reels, and plenty of Hollywood nonsense.
Those elements carried across the logo, cards, packaging, and supporting pieces, giving the game a recognizable look without making any of it feel too precious. It needed to feel finished enough to sit on a store shelf, but playful enough that nobody mistook it for serious business.
Telling the Cards Apart at a Glance
Play Your Cards Right
The four decks drive the whole game, so players needed to tell them apart immediately without stopping to think about it. I gave Genre, Descriptor, Hero, and Plot their own bold colors while keeping the typography, iconography, and card structure consistent across the set.
The custom movie icons added personality without getting in the way of gameplay. Once the cards hit the table, color does most of the organizational work, leaving the prompts themselves to deliver the absurd combinations.
Funny Money
Pitch and Get Paid
Selling a terrible movie is only half the job. If the Producer buys the pitch, players get paid in fake studio money, which gave me another part of the game to mess with.
I illustrated the bills with familiar American historical figures recast through Hollywood clichés and movie props. It turned what could have been a generic scoring device into another visual joke, while keeping the whole reward system firmly inside the world of the game.