MADness #160: Dysfunctional Family Board Games!

Time again for another of the final steps along the stumbling trek that was my work for MAD Magazine. You will be relieved to know that this is the penultimate stop along that journey. In fact this piece was published in MAD #46, Dec 2025, which went on sale a mere three months ago! It was written by my CLAPTRAP partner-in-crime Desmond Delvin.

This piece was a milestone for me. My very first published piece in MAD was in #399 (Dec 2000) which hit the stands in October of that year. This one dropped in October of 2025, marking 25 years of my being one of the Usual Gang of Idiots. You’d think doing anything for 25 years straight you’d eventually get the hang of it, but I am often the exception that proves the rule!

The theme of this issue was “family dysfunction”, and the gag here was taking a family board game and turning it from your typical wholesome family-time fun into something that reflected broken family dynamics. I looked at examples of classic board game boxes that depicted families playing the game to get a feel for the typical look and design. Des helpfully had links to some examples in the script. The box needed to contain four family members as described here:

• Player 1 (Boy): crying
• Player 2 (Girl): looking 17 years old, cradling a newborn baby
• Player 3 (Stepdad): stabbing his own arm with a fork, has a dead thousand-yard stare
• Player 4 (Mom): in the background, standing in the kitchen doorway, guzzling a bottle of booze; her chair at the table is empty

Des described the other elements like the playing pieces, the different cards, the stops along the game track, etc. This was my initial very rough pencil:

After review it was decided having the dad stabbing himself with a fork was a little too dark, so we decided to just have him looking like he was frazzled and at the end of his rope via expression. This simple stab at a box design was for general layout purposes. After some discussion with MAD art director/editor/empress Suzy Hutchinson, she volunteered to do the graphics treatment of the box. so she sent me this with my sketch mocked in:

Thanks to the magic of PhotoShop, I just did the cover at a straight on angle and then would distort the proportions to put it in perspective on the table top in the final. Here’s another rough sketch of just the box:

I used myself as reference for the dad. The only direction I got with this was that the mom looked too young. They wanted to be sure the girl on the left with the baby would be unmistakably the daughter and look to be about 16 or 17 years old, and the mom clearly older. So I recruited The Lovely Anna to model for the mom. We were both 59 in these photos so we were really way too old to be parents to a 17 year old girl and a 9-10 year old boy, but whatever.

I naturally look frazzled and at the end of my rope so I didn’t need much interpretation for me, but I had to really add a lot of hard life aesthetic to Anna’s character to get the right look. This is actually a good example of how to use photo reference. It’s best used as a foundation and then artistically changed as needed to suit the purpose of the art, rather than slavishly duplicated. Here’s the final box art:

I did other elements of this piece separately and placed them in the image to create the final. Photoshop allows you to transform images in different ways, including a handy “distort” mode that makes it easy to take a rectangular image like this and manually play with it to create a perspective effect. In this case the box needed to be at an angle to the viewer, looking downward and across the table surface. I did a simlar thing to create the sides of the box. Here’s the final art:

Tht’s it for another Monday MADness! Only ONE MORE stop to take on this MAD journey and we are caught up to present day. Toon in next week where I’ll do a big wrap up of this entire tedious trek that no one asked for and after that… crickets.