I wanted to start to shine a light on some more Australian creators in the boardgame sphere and I have started with polymath Brooke Penrose designer of the Valka card game (through Terrible Games). Brooke is a designer, musician, creator, father, illustrator and artist from Naarm (Melbourne, Australia).

I was drawn to Brooke’s work through the Valka Kickstarter and loved his weird, desaturated art in that game – after following his Instagram I found that he is a person of many talents and passions.

 

I asked Brooke about his inspirations in his art, and Valka, and he says that his inspirations are varied. He credits ‘Fire and Ice’ an animated film by Bakshi and Frazetta as one of his favourite films when he was growing up.

I studied art after high school and draw a lot of inspiration from old
artists, particularly Albrecht Dürer, Goya and Pieter Bruegel the
Elder

Brooke credits Brian Froud and his book ‘Goblins of Labyrinth’ (from the movie ‘Labyrinth’) as one of his biggest influence, as well as:

artists like Russ Nicholson, Les Edwards, Ian
Miller, Gary Ward and Paul Bonner (from fantasy works in White Dwarf, DnD and Fighting Fantasy)

In relation to the development of Valka, Brooke states that his biggest challenge was play-testing to get the game as good as it possibly could be.

I’m not very patient and struggle with
rule-books, so that side of it took a lot of help from John DeCampos
from Terrible Games. Apart from that, I think it all went pretty well.

 

I asked Brooke about whether he has any other designs in the pipeline, and while he does have a few that he is working on, he’s not quite ready to discuss them at the moment. In the last few years, Brooke has also released a Tarot deck and more recently a Divination Oracle. I also mentioned Brooke as a polymath – so it would be remiss of me to not mention his music career which he releases music under several names, but primarily Saint Jude.

 

In his down time Brooke tends towards fantasy and adventure games with a “healthy dose of creativity” – games like Dungeons and Dragons, Warhammer 40,000 and playing Dungeon Mayhem and Stardew Valley with his kids.

I was drawn to Brooke’s work through his authentic disposition on his Instagram page, and thought that people might like to know a bit more about one of our own Australian creators. Be sure to check out and support Brooke where possible, most of his stuff you can find on captainbstudios.com