Zestrea Board Game

Zestrea is a hilarious Romanian board game loosely based on local customs and traditions. Players act as old time nobles, Boyars and Boyaresses, taking care of the villagers who live on their land, setting up weddings and surviving hard time. The project was funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

The designers, Horațiu Roman and Alex Pațiu, invited me to play a round of Zestrea, back in early prototype stage, and I fell in love with the concept. It is really fun to play, and it had a special Eastern-European twist, the laugh-at-your-sorrows brand of humor used to survive real life hard times. Taking inspirations form traditional motifs (folk costumes from Cluj, rugs from Oltenia, authentic boyar attires), I designed the illustrations and tried to put my own-geometrical-spin on the images.

After a lot of play-testing and design challenges, the game is available in both Romanian and English through Pronoia.