board game development

 Development of our board game:

We started off development by thinking of a game which we could either add to, or modify in someway. I thought of chess, and we started thinking about different spin-offs of the game. We thought about a version of chess called "FPS chess" and thought about how that could be made into a board game, though gave up on the idea later after realizing it wouldn't really work out.

But this did give us the idea to put a completely new spin on chess and try add some mechanics to make it feel more original .  We know that chess is pretty much a strictly skill-based game, though we wanted to change it up a little and our first idea was to give each piece a certain stat via dice roll. So for example a pawn would have 1d4 attack and 1d4 defense, if an attacking piece rolled higher than a defending piece, it would be taken. If the defending piece rolled higher than the attacking piece, the attack would fail. With this idea we decided to give a stat to every piece and have it work like that, thought this would basically just be chess with extra steps, so we also decided to add a card system.

You would each have a deck with the same cards but shuffled randomly. Cards would be picked up after a successful attack on your opponent, and the cards would allow you to give buffs to certain pieces or de-buff your enemy. Though eventually we just decided to have it as a buff to yourself and your different pieces on the board.

We had the category of cards go as:

Common

Rare

Legendary

Unique 

With the cards and the stats we were ready to start playtesting and seeing if it worked well or not, Our first couple of tests showed that we needed to balance some of the stats and some of the cards. As you could just dump your powerful cards onto a certain piece and make them really hard to kill. After some good changing of stats, mainly with the king and queen, our game is seeming to be alot better, but it doesn't really feel like its own game.

We didn't remove any of the core mechanics from chess apart from not having checkmate, since the only objective is to destroy the king. We've just recently decided to increase the size of the board and to add a new piece as well called the "Lanceman". It fits into the game surprisingly well and works to aid the other pieces. The only big issue I have with our game at the moment is the match times, a normal game of this would last around maybe just under 2 hours. 

The last thing we've been doing as of late is trying to add some more cards into the deck. Unique cards are special in the fact that they only affect a certain piece on the board. An example is our card "Star Pawn" which allows you to move your pawn twice per go. We want to add some more unique's as it could speed the game up and allows for more combinations with other unique cards.

We have just tried to test out the game fully with all mechanics to see how it would work. The mechanics and things we wanted to work did work, however the biggest issue with the game was the clutter from the amount of pieces and tokens. I believe that there are too many pieces to keep track off, and now my team is trying to add about 4 million more token cards as well. I just think this is a pretty big issue, which we'll have to try get around to fixing eventually. This could be removing some pieces, or making the board smaller. They've said to maybe try and make a "Small" version of the game, but i think we just need to take a step back and make the game less complicated. It's already difficult to keep up with, with just the cards and dice. 





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