INVISIBLE INK TAKES THE CHAOS OF BANGKOK AND DESIGNS IT INTO ‘BANGKOK PAINS’, A BOARD GAME THAT’S BOTH PAINFUL AND CREATIVE, AND A FUN REFLECTION OF THE CITY’S EXPERIENCES
TEXT: NATHATAI TANGCHADAKORN
PHOTO COURTESY OF INVISIBLE INK
(For Thai, press here)
Bangkok Pains is a title that instantly conjures up its subject matter, even before one knows what type of design project it is. For Bangkokians, the city’s problems are so familiar they verge on numbing. Mention the cost of living, and countless friends will join in a chorus of complaints. Step into a taxi or a Grab, and chances are the conversation will soon circle back to traffic.
While the project’s content plays on the ‘pains’ of urban life in Bangkok, its form takes the shape of a board game. It’s a familiar format, yet reimagined with its own rules. Unlike Monopoly or Snakes and Ladders, this game challenges players to survive a year in Bangkok with nothing but an initial sum borrowed from a credit card. It evokes the dark humor often found online, where Thais turn to wit and irony in the face of intractable social problems. It is telling, then, that Invisible Ink, a creative agency, seized on this idea to create a work that is at once playful, biting, and leaves us wondering whether it is meant to induce headaches or laughter.
Invisible Ink itself is a cross-border agency based in Bangkok and Singapore. The team is composed almost entirely of Thai creatives, with just a few international members, including Managing Director Timothy Swainson, a British creative director who has lived in Thailand for over eighteen years, and a Russian head of animation.
“This is the city that most of us are from, or where we’ve lived for a long time. We love this city but we have pains. These things resonated with a lot of our audiences. At Invisible Ink, as a creative agency, we wanted to find sort of humorous ways to express this while practicing new skills, new techniques for our animation or artwork.”
“In 2024, we were looking for a post for our April Fool’s Day — we posted the Bangkok Pains board game, and got a lot of feedback from people. It got us thinking, ‘Do we have time? Maybe we can finish it in time for Christmas. And we can give it as a gift.’”
From concept to execution, Bangkok Pains comes complete with all the components of a classic board game: an instruction manual, a game board, player tokens, cash, and four categories of special cards (Career, Property, Pain or Gain, and Travel), along with a single credit card that stands as a symbol of debt. Along the way, players who manage to accumulate enough money can choose to pay off their card, while those hit with unexpected expenses may request a new card and take out additional cash. Bankruptcy, however, is not an option: every player must endure the bittersweet comedy of life in Bangkok until the year, and the game, reaches its end.
Invisible Ink chose to define the game’s ‘pains’ in two principal ways. The first is rent, a fixed expense drawn from the Property card at the very start. The second is the near-constant draw of Pain or Gain cards, where the hazards are all too familiar: a shattered phone screen, a surprise common area bill from the condo juristic person, or even losing a turn after missing an MRT stop because you were glued to your phone. At a certain point, every player must also decide whether to take an extended holiday, foregoing their salary but exempt from paying rent. However, from firsthand experience at a recent event where the game was played, it was clear that very few chose the holiday route. Almost everyone was intent on amassing as much money as possible.
“We set up a brief from topics that we obsess over for ourselves because we always have team development during downtime from client work. Bangkok is the city we live in, and we know a lot about it. So we can see the differences. We’re also a mix of Thai and foreigners and have a different perspective on things. Like, maybe something that Thais are just so used to, but foreigners see it another way. So we share these ideas.” Timothy Swainson, Managing Director of Invisible Ink, told us.
Naturally, not every designer has experience creating games. For Invisible Ink, the early stages of the process involved one thing above all: playing. The team immersed themselves in a range of classic board games, from Monopoly to Snakes and Ladders, and others, to gather insights. From there, they began sketching out their own rules, before moving on to repeated rounds of testing with paper mock-ups. Each playthrough helped refine the mechanics, the ideal number of players, and the factors needed to keep the game balanced, until the team finally arrived at the definitive format of Bangkok Pains.
Bangkok Pains’s public relations campaign
“We did one or two rounds of game testing in the evening or maybe at lunchtime. The main idea was from the Game of Life, we borrowed structures from it and looked at how we could link it back to the story of Bangkok. I think that part took a few weeks until we got the right concept. Ideally, we wanted the game to be played with either two people or six people. We wanted it under an hour because if you were at work or school, university maybe, an hour was all you had time for.”
On the visual side, elements such as the color palette and material choices for Bangkok Pains were carefully considered. Every detail was refined through close collaboration with manufacturers to ensure the specifications met the design team’s vision. The colors are inspired by the very colorful palette that you see out on the streets of Bangkok. It’s the colors of the taxis, the colors of the street food markets, and a lot of colors used traditionally in traditional Thai signs. The team also brought their own illustration style to all of these common elements that you see on Bangkok streets.
“We had our main supplier for the printing. The great thing is that they are a creative supplier so they understand and really appreciate what we were trying to create. We still wanted that Bangkok kitsch—the colors, the sort of glossy feel to it. We wanted it to feel a little bit kitsch as well, especially with those miniatures.”
Bangkok Pains’s public relations campaign
“The creative team had some brainstorming on the ideas, talked with the video team or illustrator to create the art direction. Once we had a product and needed to shoot the production for the launch, we worked with the video team. Then we coordinated with the web development team on how we’re going to tell the story through the wireframe, using the UX/UI designer to plan everything.”
“The development team needed to talk with the creative team and also with the 3D designers about how we could use coding to match with the 3D — how we could make it pop up on scroll or trigger animations. It was a new technique that we hadn’t tried before. We were kind of learning together in the process. Different teams joined at different stages, but at first, everyone was testing the game together.”
Bangkok Pains website
Bangkok Pains website
Bangkok Pains emerged from a creative agency pushing beyond its usual boundaries. Design projects without a client often come with the lingering question: for whom, or for what, are they made? Yet for a creator, the act of making does not always require a grand justification. Sometimes it begins with nothing more than an interest, a curiosity that takes shape until something new exists where before there was nothing. In this case, that ‘something’ is a board game: one that playfully captures a particular perspective on life in Bangkok.
“How was it?”
“It’s painfully fun.”