My name is Fabrizio Marcotulli and the game I made is called ORGANICA and it is a 2 player abstract strategy game where participants place and move their pieces to make their opponent have no valid options to continue playing.

I made this game with many things in mind. The first priority was to make as few things as possible, so I tried to reuse as many assets as I could and use pieces from games I own; this also meant I couldn't really make cards, special dice or fancy boards. This first constraint led me to using a part of a board from a different board game I was making with a friend and at most 5 different playing pieces. The decision was then made to make my game an abstract.

From this stage of development the next design choice I made was to try to emulate the movement of the pieces in a game called Hive, in which two players form a big cluster of pieces and maneuver around it to surround the other player's queen bee. The difference in my design was that, instead of forcing both players to stay together (all pieces in hive have to be connected in some way) players would have to keep only their pieces together. As it turns out, the final design was a little different than that.

The game was starting to take form at this point, but it lacked a purpose, as I had only tried basic movement mechanics. That's where the concept of the leader came in. Basically, I wanted to have a piece that could capture a different type of piece, but was also a burden to have. This allowed me to introduce an objective: to make the other player have no meaninful choices.

The rest was mostly balancing the issues that came with the introduction of the leader and coming up with a comprehensive ruleset that was also relatively short.

The ruleset to my game can be found here.They include the list os components needed to play the game, as well as the actual rules and a page with basic tips to get players started. 

A file of the board that you can print can be found here,, you'll just have to stretch it to the paper size you want to print it on. This image is not the one I used in the final version though, as I used an AutoCAD .DWG file of the board to print it.

The last bit of info that I'll show on this page is a couple of pictures of the game, one frome a top view, and another comparing it to an earlier prototype

TOP VIEW

FINAL VS PROTOTYPE

Thanks for reading.