Whiskeria

The Whiskeria Board Game team founders are Alaina Wolfe and Leora Baum, a couple living in Chicago, USA. Our current efforts are recruiting long-term artists so that all of our developments are completely hand-drawn or digitally drawn, no AI. We are avid board gamers and creatives who wanted to take the world of Redwall, Everdell, and other woodland critter inspirations into a fantasy setting that was unique, serious, and fun.

Our game tells a story as you play it, recruiting crew members to accomplish goals and overcome obstacles. Nature is harsh, and we set out to create a game that faced that reality and had fun with it. Whiskeria blends chance, strategy, resource management, adventure, and storytelling all in one box. It feels like an RPG without the roleplay, acting, or lengthy sessions. We love these types of games, but often we find that in reality, we don't always have the time to play a board game or TTRPG for six hours with lots of complex rules. So we sat down and playtested a world of our own making until we were satisfied, and honestly, we still can't get enough of how each playthrough is a unique journey. We now have an adventure game full of peril and secret treasures worth braving the wilds for, and we want to share that with you!

We sought to give Whiskeria a culture of its own. With each creative decision or direction we took, we asked ourselves what these sentient little creatures would do? How would they start out? Most of the mouse civilization we thought to be scavengers. Instead of forging blades in a forge, we reimagined them using sewing needles as swords, thumb tacks as daggers, and utilizing the small everyday items we often forget about as humans to be their utilities and unique inventions. This of course, is a work of fantasy, and some imagination is required where logic might contradict. For example, while wool isn't a resource that is totally unavailable to small critters to make clothes, you might find a squirrel donning a robe made of butterfly wings, belts made out of 'bug leather', etc.

Many of the Wilderness or Adventure elements of the game offer brief story elements for your crew's journey, and allow you to imagine a story of your own making - quite like most RPGs or TTRPGs. This can also be said for the literal art of the project, too! We wanted to use as much sketch-style and black-and-white work as we could. We hope that this will instill a storybook feeling and add to the overall feeling of the game that it's a story and a game in one.