board games can be fun? you betcha!
Bored? how about a game? a BOARD game!...HAHAHA...hahaha...ha...ok it's not that funny...but i do want to share this awesomeness :)
My two lil' bros and my niece come to visit quite often on tuesday afternoons and we spend the time playing computer games, drawing, painting and playing board games....we are a house of geeky fun to them XD the board games we have though are not your average monopoly or scrabble...ours all have a geeky theme...we have a Zombies game which allows the players to create the map by drawing a section of it each each turn from the map card pile. The goal is to run from the zombies that spawn and reach the helicopter pad (which you must wait to drawn from the map card pile) before you get eaten...we also have one called Ninja Burger that is a kind of card game with dice.....you are ninja delivery guys and your mission is to deliver the food on time while trying to sabotage the other ninja players' delivery missions :P
Another game we have is the Doom board game...now this is the one they love most....the map comes in sections of corridors and blood splattered rooms with a whole pile of scary monsters to fill them with. Last time we played it they made up their own rules and game play and decided that we each had to make a base and fill it with monsters. Each of us had one infiltrator monster that could go into another players base and try to break through the defenses setup to reach their big boss monster and beat him. When another monster was in an adjoining square you were able to fight each other by both players rolling a dice and the highest roller winning...they gave each monster type hit points and so the game went on for about 2 hours of awesome fun! Who would have thought that an 8 and 11 year old would be able to come up with an awesome game design of their own like that? and play it very happily for almost 2 hours!?
So it was getting close to my lil' bro Scott's birthday and my awesome husband Scott (yep they have the same name) suggested we make him a board game...and so the challenge began. We decided on a pirate themed game that would allow racing each other and combat in the game play. Scott worked hard on trying to create the style of play, the goal of the game and basic map design...you can find his documenting of all this here in his game design blog...
Scott's blog 1
Scott's blog 2
Scott's blog 3
We had much play testing of maps and when we had finalised all the gamplay and design i started work on constructing the board game and all the game pieces...ahhhh JOY!
The Game Board:
For the game board I started with a piece of mdf wood about 60cmx40cm and drew out a grid of roughly 1inch squares...I had already created a rough map design in Photoshop with Scott's direction on spacing and island placement...so i just had to transfer that design onto the now painted wooden board in pencil...before using acrylic paints to create the green islands and blue water, with a few island flavour items such as mountains and skull caves ...I even added a compass in the corner with a brush of gold paint for that authentic look :)
The Pirate Ships & Kraken:
The ships were carved from dense blue foam using a small saw and scalpel...then sanding them down to a smooth finish. Each ship was glued to a 1inch square piece of cardboard for the base and a piece of wooden dowling was used as a mast. I painted these model with a mixture of acrylic paints and model paints to give them a kind of wood effect. I cut out a pile of paper rectangles to use as the sails and left them blank as I want the kids to make each pirate ship theirs by designing their own :)
For the Kraken I carved three tentacles from the dense bloue foam and then tried to also carve a head...but the detail required for such a small piece made with that particular foam just wasn't achieveable for me....so i just made more tentacles and glued them to a 1 inch square...to make it look as if the tentacles were reaching out of the water from the depths below :) and hoped that a kid's imagination would be able to create a monsterous idea of what lay underneath the water. Acrylic and model paints again were used.
The Instructions:
This was awesome fun to make. Scott initially wrote out the instructions which i then proceeded to translate into pirate speak arrrrrrr.....using some random pirate translator website. I had planned to hand write the whole thing in calligraphy but using photoshop to create a mockup of the final thing made me just want to print it out...as the pirate typeface i found was awesomely cool looking....though our printer was kinda out of ink so it came out faded and I ended up going over it all with gold and black markers anyways...then the fun part of 'staining' the page with watered down brown acrylic paint and a cotton ball...once that was all dry with a little help from my hairdryer...I burnt it!!!! no really...I did...I used the stove to burn the edges of the page to make it look aged and piratey :D
The Treasure:
Haha this was fun to make...at 4am in the morning...well i left the coin making a bit late due to thinking that it would only take small amount of time. I cut rough circles from foam board and sanded down the edges before using large gold permanent marker to colour them (it's faster drying than paint) and used a black pigment marker to draw on a skull and crossbones design...they didn't look half bad either if I do say so myself :)
The Treasure Chest:
To keep all the little game pieces safe I found a small sized cardboard box and glued a few layer of paper mache over the whole thing...once dry I painted it brown and dry brushed gold along the edges and added 'Scott's TREASURE ISLAND' to the lid with a fake lock drawn onto the front...it be t' safest place to keep all th' booty..arrrrr!
Finally i ordered some dice from amazon...a nice black marble colour with gold spots....perfect for any pirate...arrrrr!
Today I got to go see family and give lil' Scott his game (with an awesomely BIG bar of chocy obviously) and we had fun playing it even if we found a bit of a problem with some people staying at the start area and trying to kill off players who were coming back to their base with treasure...but overall it was a huge success and i got a few compliments on my arty skills too XD go me! But it definately helped to do all the playtests and figure out what worked best before sticking to the final design and running with it...as we found the rules worked really well and the game was most definately fun to play :)
Want to see more photos of the pirate board game....good :) cus i uploaded a pile of them to my photobucket...HERE....enjoy!
I soooo enjoyed doing this! Bringing to life a design and making a fun mess!
My two lil' bros and my niece come to visit quite often on tuesday afternoons and we spend the time playing computer games, drawing, painting and playing board games....we are a house of geeky fun to them XD the board games we have though are not your average monopoly or scrabble...ours all have a geeky theme...we have a Zombies game which allows the players to create the map by drawing a section of it each each turn from the map card pile. The goal is to run from the zombies that spawn and reach the helicopter pad (which you must wait to drawn from the map card pile) before you get eaten...we also have one called Ninja Burger that is a kind of card game with dice.....you are ninja delivery guys and your mission is to deliver the food on time while trying to sabotage the other ninja players' delivery missions :P
Another game we have is the Doom board game...now this is the one they love most....the map comes in sections of corridors and blood splattered rooms with a whole pile of scary monsters to fill them with. Last time we played it they made up their own rules and game play and decided that we each had to make a base and fill it with monsters. Each of us had one infiltrator monster that could go into another players base and try to break through the defenses setup to reach their big boss monster and beat him. When another monster was in an adjoining square you were able to fight each other by both players rolling a dice and the highest roller winning...they gave each monster type hit points and so the game went on for about 2 hours of awesome fun! Who would have thought that an 8 and 11 year old would be able to come up with an awesome game design of their own like that? and play it very happily for almost 2 hours!?
So it was getting close to my lil' bro Scott's birthday and my awesome husband Scott (yep they have the same name) suggested we make him a board game...and so the challenge began. We decided on a pirate themed game that would allow racing each other and combat in the game play. Scott worked hard on trying to create the style of play, the goal of the game and basic map design...you can find his documenting of all this here in his game design blog...
Scott's blog 1
Scott's blog 2
Scott's blog 3
We had much play testing of maps and when we had finalised all the gamplay and design i started work on constructing the board game and all the game pieces...ahhhh JOY!
The Game Board:
For the game board I started with a piece of mdf wood about 60cmx40cm and drew out a grid of roughly 1inch squares...I had already created a rough map design in Photoshop with Scott's direction on spacing and island placement...so i just had to transfer that design onto the now painted wooden board in pencil...before using acrylic paints to create the green islands and blue water, with a few island flavour items such as mountains and skull caves ...I even added a compass in the corner with a brush of gold paint for that authentic look :)
The Pirate Ships & Kraken:
The ships were carved from dense blue foam using a small saw and scalpel...then sanding them down to a smooth finish. Each ship was glued to a 1inch square piece of cardboard for the base and a piece of wooden dowling was used as a mast. I painted these model with a mixture of acrylic paints and model paints to give them a kind of wood effect. I cut out a pile of paper rectangles to use as the sails and left them blank as I want the kids to make each pirate ship theirs by designing their own :)
For the Kraken I carved three tentacles from the dense bloue foam and then tried to also carve a head...but the detail required for such a small piece made with that particular foam just wasn't achieveable for me....so i just made more tentacles and glued them to a 1 inch square...to make it look as if the tentacles were reaching out of the water from the depths below :) and hoped that a kid's imagination would be able to create a monsterous idea of what lay underneath the water. Acrylic and model paints again were used.
The Instructions:
This was awesome fun to make. Scott initially wrote out the instructions which i then proceeded to translate into pirate speak arrrrrrr.....using some random pirate translator website. I had planned to hand write the whole thing in calligraphy but using photoshop to create a mockup of the final thing made me just want to print it out...as the pirate typeface i found was awesomely cool looking....though our printer was kinda out of ink so it came out faded and I ended up going over it all with gold and black markers anyways...then the fun part of 'staining' the page with watered down brown acrylic paint and a cotton ball...once that was all dry with a little help from my hairdryer...I burnt it!!!! no really...I did...I used the stove to burn the edges of the page to make it look aged and piratey :D
The Treasure:
Haha this was fun to make...at 4am in the morning...well i left the coin making a bit late due to thinking that it would only take small amount of time. I cut rough circles from foam board and sanded down the edges before using large gold permanent marker to colour them (it's faster drying than paint) and used a black pigment marker to draw on a skull and crossbones design...they didn't look half bad either if I do say so myself :)
The Treasure Chest:
To keep all the little game pieces safe I found a small sized cardboard box and glued a few layer of paper mache over the whole thing...once dry I painted it brown and dry brushed gold along the edges and added 'Scott's TREASURE ISLAND' to the lid with a fake lock drawn onto the front...it be t' safest place to keep all th' booty..arrrrr!
Finally i ordered some dice from amazon...a nice black marble colour with gold spots....perfect for any pirate...arrrrr!
Today I got to go see family and give lil' Scott his game (with an awesomely BIG bar of chocy obviously) and we had fun playing it even if we found a bit of a problem with some people staying at the start area and trying to kill off players who were coming back to their base with treasure...but overall it was a huge success and i got a few compliments on my arty skills too XD go me! But it definately helped to do all the playtests and figure out what worked best before sticking to the final design and running with it...as we found the rules worked really well and the game was most definately fun to play :)
Want to see more photos of the pirate board game....good :) cus i uploaded a pile of them to my photobucket...HERE....enjoy!
I soooo enjoyed doing this! Bringing to life a design and making a fun mess!