Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

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hentzau
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Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by hentzau »

My 11 year old came home with a project pack last week from his social studies class. The subject was the Revolutionary War, and he had several different projects he could do, including making a board game about the Revolutionary War. Of course he selected that one.

We started out by trying to narrow down a subject from the Revolution that we could build out a fun game for. Paul Revere's Ride? Boston Tea Party? Generic battle type game? Wait...how about Washington crossing the Delaware? Yeah, that one will work.

So in the course of an afternoon, we roughed out our idea. Trying to cross the Delaware, ice floes in your way, first player across wins. Square grid or hexes? Hexes, gives us more flexibility of movement. Roll and move, or cards? Roll and move, cards would be a lot more work (but give us more options, maybe for version 2 of the game).

Now, components. I have a bunch of little boats from an old board game, The Sinking of the Titanic. So that's all done. Playing surface? Print out hexes, that's easy. Ice? OOOH! Heroscape ice hexes! Perfect! Matter of fact, we could build the whole thing out of Heroscape! No, scratch that, it has to be transportable and make it to school and back.

Print out the hex field, tape it all together. Dig out the Heroscape, and the tiles match up perfectly...but they won't work. There's enough of a overlap because of the locking tabs that the ice will be all over the place. Need something else. Sugar cubes? Possible. Wait, I think I have a box of glass beads we could use. That works great.

We lay out the start points, and figure out a pattern of ice across the river that has open spaces in the ice. It's about 10 hexes across from Pennsylvania to New Jersey. Do we want to worry about the current? I think that would put the player at the bottom of the map field at too much of a disadvantage, so this is a calm portion of the river. Now, the rules.

Let's use a 4 sided die for ice movement. Roll the die, and that's how many pieces of ice you can move. Can you move the same piece more than once? No, each piece only moves once. Can you move ice in front of our opponent to block him? Of course! Should we roll the die for boat movement, or just let them move one space each turn? Just one space, a couple of good rolls and someone could easily run away.

So we played several rounds of it, tweaking and fine tuning. He really likes it, because he won each time. :) He now needs to finish coloring the map field. It was a fun little father son project, much more enjoyable than most of the projects he gets sent home with.
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AWS260
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by AWS260 »

That's wonderful.
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hentzau
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by hentzau »

Yeah, but this morning in the shower I started thinking about the Battle of Bunker Hill using Castle Panic rules...
“We can never allow Murania to become desecrated by the presence of surface people. Our lives are serene, our minds are superior, our accomplishments greater. Gene Autry must be captured!!!” - Queen Tika, The Phantom Empire
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LordMortis
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by LordMortis »

hentzau wrote:Yeah, but this morning in the shower I started thinking about the Battle of Bunker Hill using Castle Panic rules...
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triggercut
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by triggercut »

hentzau wrote:Yeah, but this morning in the shower I started thinking about the Battle of Bunker Hill using Castle Panic rules...
Never played it, but the game looks like fun on Tabletop. That could totally work for that setting.
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Holman
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Holman »

Making the game sounds like great fun!

Now you need a bunch of drunk Hessians for the NJ side.
Much prefer my Nazis Nuremberged.
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Remus West
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Remus West »

Holman wrote:Making the game sounds like great fun!

Now you need a bunch of drunk Hessians for the NJ side.
Are you suggesting he wait to break it out at Octocon until Hepcat, Chaosraven, and the rest of us return from the Polish Buffet.
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Kurth
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Kurth »

Sounds like a great project. I hope my 10 year old comes home from school with projects like that next year.

In the meantime, I may have to get a copy of War of the Ring . . . to help with potential homework projects, of course. :wink:
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Godzilla Blitz
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Godzilla Blitz »

What a great idea for a school project.

Our 12-year-old son came home with specific instructions about making a poster board presentation that has to include a long list of items exactly as prescribed. No deviation allowed. Sigh.
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stessier
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by stessier »

When I was in high school, we had to make a game and my brother and I did the Family Feud. We game up with a list of 20 questions and then went and surveyed the different classes until we got 100 responses per question. The teachers liked it so much we actually go to play a version of it in the auditorium. It was fun to put together, but Richard Dawson we were not.
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Zaxxon
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Zaxxon »

LordMortis wrote:
hentzau wrote:Yeah, but this morning in the shower I started thinking about the Battle of Bunker Hill using Castle Panic rules...
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Re: Made a boardgame with my son yesterday

Post by Ralph-Wiggum »

stessier wrote:When I was in high school, we had to make a game and my brother and I did the Family Feud. We game up with a list of 20 questions and then went and surveyed the different classes until we got 100 responses per question. The teachers liked it so much we actually go to play a version of it in the auditorium. It was fun to put together, but Richard Dawson we were not.
If you had really gone Richard Dawson, you could've kissed all the girls in school.
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