Self Portrait Project — Zachery: A Board Game

My project is a board game, it is resource collection, worker placement, and area control. I picked a board games because games in general are an escape, a place where little societal standards and rules apply. People play by the rules, and when someone doesn’t play nice, people can just decide not to play. It's a wonderful virtual reality. it's fun, and people can forget their troubles for just a while. It's a great way to delay doing anything. When playing board games, most of the time, I end up wanting to expand the rules, give it an interesting twist or add some new thing to change it up, so this board game is a combination of three of my favorite board games (excluding chess) added together with some other things. The point of playing games non-competitively is to have fun.

An earlier version of the game had a rectangular board and there was no dedicated path, so players got stuck at the edge of the board, paying lots of rent to the owner. Another temporary setback was that crafting was a lot more complicated with 14 resources and refinement instead of just 4 resources. I reduced it because I didn’t want to make that many resource cards. As always, there were little and large successes, like territory division of a hexagonal board into 5 slices was relatively easy, and the capturing mechanism was pretty smooth. I don’t actually know if any of this will work, because it hasn’t been play tested yet. It is a hexagonal shaped board, with 61 hexes arranged in 4 concentric rings. The board has different types of hexes, territories, jail, impassable, and others. Hexagons are better than squares because the distance from each hex to a bordering one is always 1, compared to square’s 1 and square root of 2. I had the chance to make something in my mind that I’ve wanted to do into something functional.

See his presentation: https://youtu.be/U0CFOs-jR1E