Wednesday 1 June 2016

Designing a gaming board

Bushido blossom garden

I'm getting a bit lax at updating this, apologies for that.  My excuse is that I've been working heavily on getting my Guild Ball team finished, and that work is actually busy so I haven't had a lot of free time to actually get the posts completed and put up during my lunch breaks etc.

As such, I'm a few weeks behind on what I planned to put up.  It seems a bit silly now to put up all the old Kickstarter ones I had written, and as such I'm going to spend some time tonight sorting all of that out and putting up a decent sized blog post on Kickstarter stuff.  The Nostalgia posts are the ones that took a big hit, things I had planned to write are still swimming around in the void (otherwise known as my brain), but they just aren't in an editing window yet.

Rather than dwell though, the plan here is to look at my next big personal target.  I am finally going to put some effort in to make a decent gaming board.

Bushido

So, considering I play quite a few games, I have to work out what I want to make a board for.  Bushido is going to be the clear winner here, even if I haven't played it yet, simply because its actually a reasonable target to experiment with.  Bushido only needs a 2' x 2' board, the smallest of the games I play.  This should cut down on cost, and time, so thats a reasonable start point.  While I could tackle something for Guild Ball, a pitch is not really going to be enough of a challenge in terms of modelling hobby, as.. well its flat and basically you don't want fixed terrain features.  Plus they already produce some really nice "mouse mat" pitches.  Malifaux and Mythos lose out for now, simply because of the size of the board.  I haven't even started sorting out my Dark Age stuff so thats also going to be on hold.  Of course the 2' x 2' board also means I can fit in working on it while I'm working through my backlog of commission work.

The final decider though is the setting.  I'm a huge nerd when it comes to Japanese historical culture.  I don't know a lot, but I love every detail I do know.

Also, if I can, I want to run a Bushido tournament at some point within a year.  If I'm going to do that then I need a few good boards for people to play on.  Japanese village boards will be good to make in the long run, but there is something I want for my first board, something a little special.

Cherry Blossom

So this picture is pretty much the inspiration for what I'm going to be going for.  Cherry Blossom trees are/were very important for the Samurai, and gardens were carefully cared for.  As such, my feature board is going to be based off the idea of a Cherry Blossom Garden.

The Centre point of the board will be a small shrine area.  The shrine will need to be an open enough structure that objective markers can fit inside for some of the scenarios.  In addition I need to think about the spaces around that for the other markers that are in the game.

I want to include a couple of bridges and some water effects to do rivers encircling the shrine.  All of this needs to fit into the confines that I have already mentioned in terms of objectives, plus of course the board has to be relatively even, so there isn't an obvious benefit on either side of the board.

Then there is the last bit, the Cherry Blossom trees.. which isn't easy as their aren't really that many good options online.  This might mean I have to work out how to make my own.

Stage One

So the first step will actually be drawing the design, possibly on paper first and then scanning it over to computer to just neaten everything up.  It'll also mean I can make sure that all the spaces for the objective markers are going to work out.  Once that is done then I will be working on getting the materials together (I partly have this already as I have got the wooden base for making a game board already).  I don't want a completely flat design, but on a 2' x 2' area anything exceptionally hilly will likely stop the models being able to fit on the board, so I have to think about how I'm going to do this.
I've got some ideas as well for how to do the trees, but I'm definitely concerned that they will fall apart over time, so thats going to take a bit of thinking through.

In the meantime

I'm just going to put my Guild Ball painting up on here as well, just because.  It at least will show you what I have been up to with my time.



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