Board game progress report (Advanced Game Design) - 20131015

Today, my group in advanced game design sat down and did some design on our board game assignment. This day we tested the movement system that we was going to use in our game.

The idea of our game is that there is one monster player that is hunting the other players down, who in term has to search buildings to find a item, which they then has to get to a certain location. The first player who achieves this win the game.

But there is one twist to all of it, the monster stays hidden from the other players for most of the game. The monster is only revealed after a certain amount of turns has passed (currently four) or if they land on the same square the monster. If the monster and another player lands on the same square, the player is killed.

One question that might pop up know is, how does it prevent the monster player from cheating? The answer is that the monster writes down the movement he/she does each turn, which the players can then check up if they question it.

Our first version of the board and rules of the game

Now lets show some images from the development process today.

The initial version of our board looked like this. The monster starts in the middle and the other players starts in each corner of the map.

Each square was given a number on the board, which is used by the monster player to write down his movement across the board.

Here, the rules were that each player (including the monster) would roll a D6 and then move up to that many squares across the board. The roll of the monster is also open. The goal the players has is to go get to the white square, fins items and then retreat back to their starting square (1, 6, 11 and 16 respectively in the image above). The players can move between the diagonal shortcuts, marked with two white lines (all other white lines where not supposed to be there)

We did some testing with this board, but we quickly realized the the board was to small, becuase it became very easy for the monster to catch up with the players. So we decided to try out the same mechanics but with a bigger board. Below are some images from the evolution of our new board.

The second version of the board

We started out with a simple squared paper

Added some start points

We started to come up with ideas for a maze

 And eventually evolved it into our final version of the board

In this new board, the boxes that are red are search areas, where the players have to go to and find the items they needed. However since that system was not the main focus today, the search system didn't do any impact on the game play other than the player has to forfeit a turn when they search for items.

One thing needs to be said about the board. Aside from the two small blue lines just over the lowest red search area, every line on the board is passable as long as the players doesn't move into the filled blue territory.

Playtesting the second board

We kept the rules mostly the same as we had for our first board and played three games on the new board before we were to tiered to continue. The rule change was that instead of being permanently killed by the monster when they land on the same square, heroes are instantly respawned at their starting location instead.

This time, we liked the board better because this time, it wasn't as easy for the monster to keep up with the player and when the monster did, it was also more spread out over time and not all at once. We let different persons on our time play as the monster, and mostly got the same results to as of how often the player got killed.

When we was to tiered and hungry to continue playing, we deiced to call it a day as we had come up with a movement system that we were satisfied with and that we could build our other systems around.