Ever since I visited PAX Unplugged during its inaugural year back in 2017, I have wanted to dive into tabletop design. In fact, as soon as I got home, I set to work on designing a worker placement game that incorporated area control and mild role play elements. Unfortunately, life caught up with me and the design had to be put on the back burner.
Over the past two and a half years I have opened my design documents numerous times, made tweaks, even crafted some pieces, but never got much momentum beyond that, which is a shame as I felt I wasn’t far from having a playable prototype. A substantial amount of work has already been done, with many ideas having already been tried and discarded.
I’d like to put an end to this procrastination. My intention is to start writing about on my progress, in hopes that making my work public will encourage me to keep up with my work. I’ll start by journaling what I already have, but most of this will be for future article. The purpose of this article is to put myself and my intent out in the wild where someone else can see it, as well as give a little information of what I’m setting out to do.
The Game - Valley (Working Title)
In Valley, 2 to 4 players take the roles of common folk who have grown tired of the corrupt leadership in their home valley. Each player will seek to gain the favor of the valley’s people so that they may seize the seat of power. To do this they will recruit people to their cause, assigning them to work the land, performing quests, and defending the valley from the monsters which wander into the valley.
I won’t go into the mechanics in this article, but I did want to touch on a few key features that I want to be present in the final game.
Randomly generated map using hex tiles to ensure no two games are the same (Player start positions and Points of Interest will be per-determined).
An array of Character roles for the players to choose from which will influence their style of play.
Villages throughout the valley provide a variety of quests for the players to complete.
Combat, both PvP and PvE, though with the option of cooperative play.
I’m hoping that by incorporating elements like this into my design I can create a worker placement game that feels exciting rather than just a simple numbers game (Not to say I don’t love that style of game). If nothing else, I hope I can convey an interesting perspective on board game design from an amateur’s viewpoint.
Some Pictures
As I said earlier, I’d already started prototyping previously, and while I didn’t take as many photos as I’d have liked, I do have some to share.
Resource and Home Tile concepts
The above was my first attempt at designing resource tiles and the home tile (center). We can ignore the top hex, an idea I had for the backing of the tiles. I’m not a skilled artist, but I got carried away drawing these images too early, something I quickly realized was a mistake as there was nowhere for iconography to fit. There is still value though in that it will help inform future designs. The home tile is closer to what a hex currently looks like, but we’re going to ignore the iconography for now.
Conceptualizing a four player map.
In this photo I produced numerous hexes on card stock so that I could conceptualize what the game board would look like. Again, I won’t go into too much detail now, but you can see here more work on iconography, as well as two tokens: Workers, and Influence. The workers will certainly receive a different name, but I think just about everyone knows their purpose is to do the work that needs doing. This will include working the land and fighting battles. The Influence tokens are less obvious, but simply put, these mark tiles that a player has influence over, a requirement before the player can utilize the hex.
I have much more in the works than this, but I’ll save further discussions for future articles, in which I intend to dive into individual mechanics, possibly with summaries here and there to wrap it all into an easily consumable packages.