Board game creation
This time I will be deviating a little from the previous posts. When I participated in DADIU ‘22 in the role of game & level design, we had a day during the team introduction trip where people got sorted into groups to work on creating a board game from scratch. I came up with an idea that the team went with and I always liked what we worked on trying to make. Earlier this month there was a testing day in central Copenhagen where people could show up to both get their mockups/prototypes tested and volunteer to test for others, for both computer and analog games, and this made me want to try and finish up a version of the previously mentioned idea that could explore some of the additional thoughts I’ve had about it since.
So going forward on this blog page, hopefully some progress with creating a prototype based off this boardgame idea will be intermixed with my ‘big’ game idea and potentially other game creating thoughts too.
First picture is of one of the earliest versions on the day. At this point we had noticed that team only tiles would not be doable and started to make tiles both teams could create a connection through, depending on how it was placed.
The second picture is a few versions later, starting positions for the routes were now a thing to be picked without communicating between the team members and we experimented with environment like a mountain block in the middle that could not be used and weather that prevented action where it currently was. At this point we had explored the multi team tiles, and had begun to look at what happened when each team were assigned a set amount of each type of tile.
The basic idea as it is currently: 4 players, separated into teams of two, the river construction team and the rails construction team, take turns placing a tile that has either connections only for one team or for both teams, the first team to connect from their 2 starting positions across the board wins.
The biggest challenge will be the balancing aspect. How many tiles should the players have access to? which tiles should they have access to? and how should they have access? These will be the main focus points as tactical placing of the tiles is the core and the decisions directly influence how the game will be played by the players.