Challenge 4: Design A Board Game For Adults

So, what's this challenge all about?

As most of you will know, Renae and I play a lot of board games.  A lot of board games.  Our shared love of gaming was one of the things that made our relationship work in the first place and it remains a cornerstone of our marriage now.  Most days we'll settle down to at least one game of something and a fair chunk of our disposable income goes on feeding our habit.

Previously, Renae and I designed and made a worker placement game for our big kids based on the How To Train Your Dragon TV series.  It was ok.  It functions well enough, but it's not super engaging for adults.  I also wrote a zombie apocalypse house party game (think one of those murder mystery dinner parties, crossed with the Walking Dead and a choose your own adventure book).  It worked pretty well, but a couple of iterations of play would really help tighten it up.  Obviously enough, I've never quite got around to doing so.

Well, the whole point of these challenges is to give me space to do things I never quite get around to, so for this challenge I need to design, prototype and play test a board game for grown-ups.

How's it going to work?

I'm going to be designing the rules, sketching out rough, place-holder pieces and generally getting the game to a beta-test level of finish mechanically.  Whether I'll bother taking it beyond that remains to be seen, but I want to get the game to a point I'm broadly happy with.  I'm not aiming for production level quality here, not absolute perfection in rules.  Just a decent, functional game with no obvious improvements required beyond presentational polish (or at least, no obvious improvements I can see).

So far, I'm leaning towards a dedicated two-player game with time as an explicit mechanic.  That's time taken to play, not time-management in the traditional board game sense. I'm also quite taken with tying this into a time travel theme, which is also informing some of my early thinking on mechanics and design.  But we'll see.  I'm slightly concerned that my current thinking may not result in a fun game.

Watch this space for future updates.

Long-term updates


French words "learned" (according to the memrise app): 298
Daily photos taken? Yes, still doing fairly well on this challenge. 
Swordfighting learnt: None, as Renae is away in the States this week, leaving me in charge of the kids.
 
I am currently reading: Nothing.  It turns out that Renae being away didn't result in more reading, but rather more exhaustion!
"Cheat" days on food since last week: One or two. While I've not been eating particularly well, I've also not been binging quite as much as I expected.  Whether it's one or two cheat days depends on how much quanbtity or quality is your measure.
"Cheat" days on exercise: Several. I've been dropping the little kids to nursery in time for the bus which requires driving down, which also means driving up.  At least we got out and about on Saturday at Vogrie.

Drawing update: I've finally finished my 30 day drawing course (after almost 60 days).  I have actually been drawing almost every day, it's just that most of the lessons took about an hour to finish, rather than the advertised 20-30 minutes.  For my final lesson, I had to draw my hand.  The result was surprisingly hand-like!  I'm pleased with how this is going so far.
Give us a hand, would you?

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