The theme for this week’s 52Frames was “Trapped”. I would expect a lot of conceptually darker images in this album; I decided I didn’t want to do that because my mood really didn’t need that kind of thing right now.

So I played around with the idea of board games – there’s a lot of situations where, as a player, you feel trapped either by previous bad decisions or by bad luck. I was first considering abstract games like go or chess – except I don’t play any of these (and I don’t own boards for them!) Connect4 or Tic-Tac-Toe would have been an option too. A couple of other ideas came to my mind – a player getting its road cut at Ticket to Ride, or a territory getting disconnected at Terra Mystica – but that felt too “niche” to convey the concept to a greater audience.

I settled for Monopoly – and that sinking feeling of “well, I just rolled the pair of dice that sent me to jail”. I don’t particularly enjoy Monopoly, but as concept illustration, it can actually go a long way!