Building a Board Game

We’ve recently started working on our final assignment in Advanced Game Design. We’ve been tasked with making a board game, or rather a well polished system to be used in a board game.

One of our first priorities has been to set an aesthetic goal for the project. We got kind of hooked on a pirate theme where players sail their pirate ships into a thrilling sea battle, but in order to focus on polishing the core system (ship movement), we later abstracted this to an aesthetic goal of delivering the experience of sailing. It is, however, very likely that we’ll return to the pirate theme later on. Because pirates are awesome.

Building the prototype

The basic components of the sailing system are a hexagonal grid, hexagonal game pieces with an arrow showing their direction and a spinner showing the direction of the wind. The players simultaneously announce wich way to turn their ships each round and then move a set amount of steps depending on their orientation relative to the wind.

We feel that the system has potential, but we’ve also discovered a small flaw in that all ships move at the same speed as long as the’re facing the same diretion. This can prove problematic if players start chasing each other or if they race to a destination. We’ll need to keep an eye on this potential problem as we’re going forward.