Boardgame Aesthetics

So this Wednesday I had a sit-down with my group where we were to come up with aesthetics for the Boardgame we are to make. Things went surprisingly smooth and within two hours we had a lot of ideas to work with.

The aesthetics we came up with was:
Exploring: We want the players to explore different “areas” and to force them to move around we added our second aesthetic.
Stress: To force the player to move around we will introduce stress in the form of time and objectives, the player will have to do a certain amount of things before the time runs out. The time doesn’t have to be time as in seconds and minutes, preferably it will be “in game time”(turns in the game).
Challenge: We want the game to be challenging, not only in the way that the two aesthetics above create, but also in the sense that you have to conquer different enemies.
Fellowship: It’s really usual that games sets the players against one another, we wanted the players to work with one another and create a co-operative experience.

We started to think about settings in which these Aesthetics would prospore and the first setting that came to mind was Caverns. It’s perfect for Exploring since it can contain hidden tresures or fierce monsters; the monsters add Challenge and the players have to work together to survive the treacherous cavern and thereby creating Fellowship. But to increase the Fellowshipin the game we wanted to add an overmind, something that works against them and controls the cave. This could be an “AI” but that doesn’t make the players unite as much as if it’s another human being working against them and constantly stands in the way, so we added another player.
This players goal is to hinder the other players from completing their goals by placing enemies, setting traps, tirggering events and so on. This also helped to create Stress, since we could make the “overmind” stronger each turn eventually making it overpower the other players.
But this player will also feel Stress and Challange since that player have to stop the other players before they conqure the dungeon.

To add replayability we want to make the “cave-rooms” randomly generated. This could be achieved by the players picking tiles from a stack and then place them where they want to explore, or that the “overmind” creates a cavern beforehand; or perhaps that all the tiles are placed upside down in a random order(like in settlers of catan’s preparation) and are then flipped when the players enter that room.