15 Minute Board Game Challenge

Setting: Ancient Roman Empire

Place: A long road to a hill covered in crosses.

Path: A long road with crosses on either side.

Player: A legionnaire in the Roman Empire's army marching prisonners to the hill at the end of the road.

Art Work: Unpleasent.

Parts, marker and 2D6 per player, plus one set of 2D6 for "pass off" rolls.

Turn rotation.

Player choice's: move (at least one square towards the hill) or "pass off"

Setup: Roll your 2D6, the lower number is your "prisoners" result. Place your marker a number of squares toward the hill equal to this result. If you rolled doubles, reroll but if you roll doubles twice keep the result of one of the dice as your "prisoners" result. The other dice is your "move" dice.

Turn Choice 1: Roll your "move" dice, subtract the number showing on your "prisoner" dice, if this result is negative or zero move one square towards the hill, otherwise move a number of squares equal to the result towards the hill.

Turn Choice 2 (when sharing a square with another player): Roll the 2D6 set aside for "pass off" rolls, if the result rolled is less than the number of slaves you have, you can "pass off" prisoners to other legionnaire sharing your square. You can not "pass off" your last slave. You can not "pass off" more slaves than would give another legionnaire more than six prisoners. For each prisoner you "pass off" reduce the number on your "prisoner" dice by one and increase the number on their "prisoner dice" by one. If the "pass off" roll result was higher than the number of prisoners you have, your turn ends.

When your at the hill: This is the crux of it, at the end of your turn reduce the number of prisoners on your dice by one. If this would mean you have zero prisoners, you are the first one to finish and get to go home first. As this isn't a game of repeat plays, you win. If you want to play for repeat wins, then whoever goes down the path 3 times first or removes 7 prisoners from their dice in total while on the hill wins.

Mostly the game works in the single trip effort, players risk getting ahead by attempting to pass off prisoners, but succesfully passing off prisoners means you can probably win the game. Note: 2D6 average is 7.

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Creation & Train of Thought during the activity, Let's make a game.

“If you have never made a game before, it is time to get over your fear. You are going to make a game now. Take out a pencil and paper (or load up a drawing program like Microsoft Paint). This will take all of 15 minutes and it will be fun and painless, I promise.” - Ian.

Now I have made a game, but the entire point of following this blog is to experiment, and get new frames of reference into my thinking for game design. So I've got out my paper and pen. He says draw a curve, and ... well I like to draw so I draw several. Ok, I have a hill and some pluses on the hill.

The next effort is to come up with an objective for players. We are trying to make a race-to-the-end-of-the-board-game-like-Candy Land. “Second, come up with a theme or objective. The players need to get from one end of the path to the other; why? You are either running towards something or running away from something.” -Ian. I think my race to the end will be set in ancient Rome during the Roman Empire and involves ... crucifixion. This seems a little adult, but it's what I've got and I've only got 15 minutes so I'm not going to second guess myself any further. The goal then is to get there first, nail in the prisoner your escorting, and thus go home first.

“Third, you need a set of rules to allow the players to travel from space to space. How do you move?” and then “although it is missing one element common to many games: conflict. Games tend to be more interesting if you can affect your opponents, either by helping them or harming them. Think of ways to interact with your opponents.”-Ian. Now personally I dislike dice but in this case I see where we're going and I'll use dice but I also think I'll add in a complication. Each player gets two dice, two six sided dice of different color, one represents the number of prisoners a player has and the other the number of spaces the legionnaire (the player) can move. Everyone rolls the dice, the lower of the two results (on doubles re-roll) is the number of prisoners and will reduce the moves a player can make in a turn by that much. On your turn you can roll the dice and move a number of spaces equal to = move dice result – number of prisoners, OR if your in the same square as another player you can give prisoners to another player, roll both dice at the same time if that dice result is lower than the number of prisoners another play has you can give them all but one of your prisoners and you move the results of the dice - 1. Exception: If a player has six slaves, they can not get any more slaves! This means that you can forfeit your turn to try to be able to always move the result of your move dice – 1. However I realize now that maybe you sometimes don't move, so let's amend that if you tried to move no matter what the move dice – prisoner dice equation result is you always move one square. Finally paths, I could allow multiple paths, some longer but maybe not around anyone else but this hinders the one choice I've allowed (passing off slaves). I will say however that you start a number of spaces ahead of the “start” square of the one path equal to the slaves you have.