Constructing a Board

Hi guys, Kevin here, and I'm going to talk about the initial design of the game board.

Quite possibly the biggest task of developing a boardgame in its own right is the construction of the board. The board represents the map which contains the geography of the game, and is also the platform for telling the story of a board game.

Now, you'll probably be thinking "hold the phone, a story in a board game?" Well, if you look at anything from Risk or Talisman to Warhammer, these tell stories of what your pieces aim to do, even Chess has a story of an army trying to slay a King by getting past an army. The complexity of a board game's story can be furthered using your own imagination to add character.... but that's just for total nerds, right? (Go on, this is a safe place).

Anyway, to construct this board, I opted for the diamond shape instead of a square shape, because being able to move your units in one tile in any direction may be too plain on a traditional board. I created several copies of each board, and here is a screenshot of the one that I personally feel is best-suited to the game.

Now then, I know this image makes zero sense, it's just a mesh of colours and blocks. But, the colours have meaning in the design of the game rather than the board itself at this stage. What I will give away is the following:

• The board is symmetrical so that both players will have to cross the same environments in their journey
• The brown diamonds (those are brown, right?) will be where the player's units start off. A lot of discussion went into how long this row should be and whether or not the units should have an empty tile between each of them. We've settled on six here to keep the units centred on the board, not giving away too much space for movement to either side.
• The second row contains 7. I created two designs where this "six-width" board would have five on the second row (cutting off the two from the end), but I prefer this wider board because it encourages more free movement while still being small enough that contact between the units of the two players will be forced, initiating combat.
• The red row is what I call my baby, because this is where the no-man's land would be on the board, when a unit comes in, an "environmental shift" competitive event (possibly randomised) will take place that will decide whether that unit is forced to stay on their own side, or if they can cross over to enemy territory. This is a work in progress in finding the right use of these events and the gameplay of how these events will take place is something that will be looked at next week.

I'd like to tell you all of the colours, but then that would be telling, and everything at this stage is still subject to change as it is early days. But hopefully, you have a general idea of what may end up being the shape of the final board for our game.

All of this is to be discussed tomorrow night in our second team meeting (location TBD), where the final shape of the board should be decided before we begin to implement gameplay.

Thank you for reading, and good night from the Red Carpet!