Salt Entertainment Adapts Tasting History for Tabletop Gaming
You know that moment when a client sends you a brief for something you'd never have pitched yourself — and it turns out to be exactly the kind of project that stretches your portfolio in a direction you didn't know you needed?
That's the energy around Salt Entertainment's announcement of Tasting History with Max Miller: The Board Game, a tabletop adaptation of the wildly popular YouTube series hosted by TIME100 Creator Max Miller. If you've been building a career in licensed IP work, this one's worth watching — not for the food angle alone, but for what it tells you about where the industry is sourcing its next wave of commissions.
A Familiar Name Behind the Design
The designer credit here is Michael Shinall, Salt Entertainment's Head of Design and Development, whose portfolio reads like a who's-who of licensed tabletop heavyweights: Marvel Zombies: A Zombicide Game, Bloodborne: The Board Game, Masters of the Universe: Clash for Eternia, and A Song of Ice and Fire: Tabletop Miniatures Game. That's a body of work built entirely around interpreting established visual worlds and translating them into component art, box illustrations, and card layouts that feel authentic to the source material while still functioning as a playable product.
If you've ever struggled with the tension in your own portfolio between "I painted what I wanted" and "I solved the brief," Shinall's trajectory is a useful benchmark. He didn't design these games in isolation — each one required deep collaboration with illustrators, graphic designers, and art directors who could channel a franchise's visual DNA into something new. The Tasting History game is his first project that isn't adapting a fantasy or sci-fi IP, which means the art direction will need to build its own visual language from scratch.
What This Tells You About the Market
Salt Entertainment's President of Gaming, Geoff Skinner, described the board game as "a natural extension" of Miller's series, which blends historical storytelling with faithfully recreated recipes from across centuries and civilizations. That's a wide visual palette — ancient Rome, medieval banquets, royal courts, wartime kitchens — and translating it into a cohesive tabletop experience is no small art-direction challenge.
For you as an illustrator, this is the kind of brief that separates portfolio pieces from career work. Can you paint a Roman garum factory that reads clearly at card size? Can your medieval feast illustration hold up when it's shrunk to two inches on a game board? If you've been building a fantasy-heavy portfolio and wondering whether historical or food-adjacent subject matter belongs in your rotation, projects like this one suggest the answer is increasingly yes. The tabletop industry is expanding its IP appetite, and publishers are actively looking for artists who can handle tonal range.
What to Watch For
The game launches on Kickstarter later this year, with fans who follow the campaign before launch receiving a free Garum Expansion Pack — a nod to the fermented fish sauce that's become something of a signature in Miller's series. More gameplay details and campaign announcements are expected in the coming months, and Salt Entertainment has set up a notification page at launchoracle.com.
If you're an artist who's been eyeing the tabletop space but waiting for the right brief to target, keep an eye on the art direction reveals as they drop. The visual choices Salt Entertainment makes here — illustration style, component layout, color palette — will tell you a lot about what this publisher values in a portfolio, and whether your work fits their next project.