Progress on the Board Game

Today we worked in the group for a couple of hours after the lectures and tried out some of the ideas we had for the board we would use in our game. First of all I should probably go through some of the plans on the game, though.

The main idea behind the game is that there are five players, one being a monster and four others being invaders of the place the monster guards. They’re looking for a treasure of some sort, magical talisman or whatever (not really relevant to the game mechanics). The monster is invisible during the most part of the game, but reveals himself every x turns (four at the moment) or when he catches an invader. If he catches an invader, the invader dies and respawns (until a certain point in the game, still to be decided). The goal for the monster is to hold the treasure, or possibly eliminate the invaders. The goal for the invaders is to individually get the treasure and leave the place alive, only one player can win.

We had discussed a kind of grid-based board with avatars moving around it through corridors, with possible shortcuts and specific rooms where they can search for the treasure. An idea for how the searching is going to play out is by drawing cards from a deck, and we would have other cards with effects as well, not only the treasure. These cards could for example stun other invaders, or grant you extra movement on the next turn.

So today we worked on the board of the game, and we started out with an idea we had discussed earlier, with the invaders starting in the  different corners and the monster starting in the middle. The search rooms would be located in the middle as well, and then there would be shortcuts specific for the invaders, so that it would be easier to escape to a safe place in case the monster was chasing them (or in case they thought the monster was). This didn’t work out very well though, since the monster could basically camp in the middle until the players went to search the rooms. This design had 61 different squares.

We then tried a different design completely, with 133 squares and a lot more different corridors throughout it, letting both the invaders and the monster strategize more when choosing when to move. It provided a lot more interesting choices for the players. In the end after a couple of iterations we felt like we had a fairly solid movement system to start out from.

Here are also some pictures from today’s session: