Now here, while I’ve been adventuring in the world of designing and producing the prototype, some germs of thought began to dawn in me about MOVING: to minimize the diagonal movement problem, I realized that the shapes could help. Let me show you:
So basically, my rough conclusion was that if I use a different side ratio for the quadilaterals, then I could introduce a new, more balanced system. The rules are simple: as movement, every unit could move one tile in the direction of the longer side or the diagonal, or move two tiles in the direction of the shorter side. That is all, and I hoped it will be easily absorbable for the players. (edit. as we are deep in the testing phase, I could state: it is not easily absorbable.)
With this decision about the shape and the dimensions, I began to asking for quotes – mostly from carpenter and panel cutting shops – to produce my tiles from plywood. This is a material that I’m used to, and I thought it could look nice as prototype. I also wanted to cut the figures, “meeples” out from this material, but don’t rush forward.
So for the prototype, I desired to show our gaming group and friends and family something really impressive. (This is for multiple reasons, like I just love to have aesthetic things, and I often demand it in almost everything, also some maximalism and other not very healthy stuff. But most probably occupational hazard haha.)
Two advice here:
- don’t do this, as it will take forever to get nice elements
- don’t do this, as the design will change a lot and most likely it will be wasted money
But I already know all of these advice from the start, and decided against is – so we are waiting to have the first test round for like 3 months now – congrats to the great decision making, Daniel. But at least in the meantime I could overcomplicate things, and probably get my focus on the wrong elements of the game, as it won’t grow organically in every direction – rather have widely over- and underdeveloped parts.
Ok, whining off.
Or I mean ‘on’ for a bit again, as the carpentries and similar shops REALLY didn’t want to cut my plywood board to 60×60 and 60×100 mm little pieces easily. Now off. So finally a shop did make the pieces for me, and delivered it home. Now I only had to grind/polish those down and glue together for the three different heights, as I’ve only cutted one 8mm thick board. This little maneuver did take like 5 months from that point.
And tadaaa:
Now we are in the middle of November, 2022.