Kwanchai Morya’s gorgeous take on co-op number game time-travels from ‘single-celled bloops to the atomic age’

It’s pretty widely agreed upon that number-counting card game The Game has a bad name, but great gameplay. Its gloomy orange-and-skulls artwork, though? Well, that’s more down to personal opinion. At the very least, it’s distinctive.

It seems that the debate over The Game’s visual style is soon to come to an end, though, with the reveal of a new edition of the game that we’d wager few could describe as anything but gorgeous.

Behind the makeover is Kwanchai Moriya, the illustrator responsible for the similarly eye-catching style of Dinosaur Island, Catacombs and RPG Overlight.

Moriya’s bright colours are the complete opposite of The Game’s former dark tones, and the illustrator has given each of the game’s numbered cards a unique piece of artwork as opposed to the original’s uniform design, which simply copied the box artwork.

Revealing the game’s new artwork on his Twitter, Moriya described his inspiration as “the game of life”, with the ascending sequence of cards moving through time from the evolution of single-celled organisms to the modern day.

That means that, as players work together to try and take two piles of cards from 1 to 100 and two piles in the opposite direction, you’ll see life and civilisation flow before you, through dinosaurs, farming, the pyramids and the industrial era to the discovery of the atom and exploration of space.

Moriya announced that his new version of The Game would be due out in the US this autumn, where it’ll be exclusive to supermarket Target. There’s yet to be confirmation of a UK release, but we’re crossing everything we have.