Tokoloshe Cards
These illustrations are part of a design project. The design was for playing cards for a game based on the rules of Mafia. The brief called for a concept and illustrations that would communicate well to a mostly South African audience. To accomplish this, I chose the characters from easily recognisable South African wildlife and plants. Each plant or animal has certain abilities in the game that reflects its behaviour in nature.
A core part of the game is the characters. These are split into two factions, the informed minority and the uninformed majority. Beyond those two factions there are several special cards that grand special abilities to whomever holds them. One, for instance, grants the holder the ability to spy on other characters' activities during the "night" phase of the game. Please see the image discriptions for more information about the individual cards.
The villager is part of the uninformed minority. They have no special abilities by default and it is their responsibility to try and vote all of the werewolves out of the game before they are outnumbered by them. The villagers are represented by a buffalo as they may seem helpless and weak, but can be very dangerous if they turn on a foe in numbers.
The Tokoloshe is part of the informed minority. During "night" phases in the game all the Tokoloshe players have to nominate a player from the uninformed minority that they want to kill. It is the objective of the Tokoloshes to eliminate as many of the uninformed minority while using persuasion and lies during "day" phases to avoid being discovered and voted out of the game.
The Protector is a special class from the uniformed minority that has the ability to protect a player from that faction from death once per night. The Protector may only do this once per game. This character is represented by a turtle as it possesses great power of protection but the holder will almost always only use it on him or herself.
Only one player can hold the King card and players from both factions may hold this card. At the beginning of a game players have to nominate themselves or other players for king, each nominee has to provide a speech to justify why he or she will make a good king. This card's holder has their vote counted as two during any vote that may be called, making it a popular but dangerous card to hold as the holder has the power to sway any vote but also falls under greater scrutiny from other players.
The Altruist is another special card that can only be given to a player from the uninformed minority. The holder of this card can save one player from being voted out of the game once per game. This, however is a great risk, as the holder of the card has no way of knowing whether or not he or she is saving a villager or a tokoloshe.