Made a boardgame with my son yesterday
Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:17 am
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.
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.