Ape City, Here I Come

Over the past few weeks, in the course of discussing games and storyworlds, I kept coming back to the example of a hypothetical board game: a simple card-driven game in which the players, as jungle explorers, race through an ancient city collecting treasures while dodging the four-armed white apes who have taken over the place.

Of course, now I want to make that game.

Over the weekend, I put together a few notes. Just for fun, I thought I’d share those notes, giving folks a glimpse behind the game design curtain. (I’m not saying this is the only way to make a board game, or even a good way, but it’s what works for me while in the brainstorming stage.)

A couple notes on the scribbles hitting your eye-holes:

• The Doodling: See the sketch of the four-armed ape? No, it’s not pretty, but I find doodling is a good way to loosen up the brain juices and get the creativity flowing. For the same reason I spent far too much time fiddling with crude logo ideas. But while my right brain pondered the best arrangement of those words and letters, my left was coming up with the concept of “ape doors,” which solved a couple design problems that had come up. (I go into some depth on the power of doodling in a previous post.)

• Card Numbering: At the top is a little two-column chart labeled “Cards.” The column on the left has the card numbers (1-10), while the column on the right has the contents of those ten cards (which, confusingly, are also numbers, zero through 4, and are how many spaces the player can move when playing the card). Yes, the game will have more than ten cards, but I like to design with a discrete set like this so I can establish ratios. So whether there are 40 cards in the final game or 400, I know that 10% of them will have “0” on them, and 40% will have “2”.

• Proto-tracking: On the left edge is a grid dotted with circles, squares, and triangles. This is a rough sketch of what the track on which the players race might look like. Note that there are four rows, and each row has ten spaces. Again, there’s nothing magical about that number, other than it makes it easier to extrapolate the ratios of the types of spaces I’ll need.

• Make it End: At the bottom is a little note to myself. “Game ends when first player exits board.” Too often, I’ll come up with an awesome set of game mechanics, but totally neglect to design the victory condition. And in game that’s both a race to the end of the board and a competition to see who can pick up the most toys along the way, it’s important to actually have a victory condition in mind before sanding off the edges of the mechanics.