Board Game Development Thoughts

My team has now begun working on a board game design. We haven’t gotten very far, we’ve mainly settled on a theme and some core concepts for the game. It’s going to be a kind of mix between Settlers and Drakborgen; we love the very risky and unpredictable exploration in Drakborgen and we want to combine that with the resource gathering and building of Settlers. We also want the friendly competition feeling you get from Settlers, where players can sabotage somewhat for each other, but wont fight each other.

When discussing it in terms of computer games Dwarfs!? and Starcraft has been brought up. We imagine the game to be set in some kind of cave system and the players managing underground dwelling explorers. In order to win players will need to explore, gather resources, build up their base and research new technology. This is not set in stone though.

Yesterday I discussed the game with my brother in order to find some new ideas and improve on the ones we already have. We talked a bit about the game board, it could be a shared tile based board as in Drakborgen, but the players could also be exploring from separate bases which they expand upon (each player having their own mini-board). Either way, it is incredibly important that the players can have meaningful interactions with each other.

We also talked about the way more complex board game handle turns. Many board games that let the players perform many different actions suffer from the individual turns being very long and players. Once a players turn is over they will not be doing anything for a time, and they risk getting bored or feeling excluded. Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy solves this problem very neatly by dividing each round of the game into phases. There can for example be a building phase, a producing phase, an exploring phase. Once a phase is initiated all players will in turn get to perform the action that phase allows for. This system will keep all players involved in the game all all times, and it allows for much more interesting interaction between the players. It is likely we will be using this kind of system for our game.