Tim Yordy Board Game Designer?

Whenever I am fortunate enough to take a vacation from work I often make time to work on some of my musical pursuits. This is of course fit in around family activities. That wasn’t the case this time around however. On my first day of vacation I got an idea for a simple strategy board game for my son and I to play. It only took about 15 minutes to make but I enjoyed it so much that ideas were quickly filling my head for a more complete game based on the concept that I had introduced with my son.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve added things, removed things, tweaked and reworked elements of the game until what has emerged is a pretty complete strategy game.

While ideas for board games have crossed my mind in the past, this is the first time I have had such a complete idea and actually turned it into reality. Below is a picture of the first paper prototype of the game that I played with my son. It’s not much to look at and the board design has come a long way. And of course the game won’t actually use plastic army men.

I’ve playtested the game a handful of times and that’s what has led to most of the changes that were implemented so far. To give you an idea of the gameplay: It’s a two person game wherein each player is given 12 soldiers and some of those soldiers are given random special abilities. On each players turn they are able to move or shoot based on a limited number of allowed actions per turn. There are also several different types of terrain in the game that change each time it is played and this also affects what strategies each player may try to use. Similarly there are random events that are activated by specific squares on the board. These Events can either be a positive or negative thing and so players must choose wisely whether they want to chance putting a soldier on one.

Ultimately, I hope to find an avenue to release the game publicly. I’m still a long way off from that however. The next steps are to continue to test and tweak the gameplay, continue to work on the graphic design of the final board and of the Event and Ability cards, and to design the play pieces themselves.

Once all of that is done I will need to have a professionally made prototype to allow me to promote the game for public release when the time comes.

It feels a little early in the development process to be discussing all of this in a blog post but I need an outlet for my thoughts on the game other than people who are close to me, because I’m sure a couple of them are tired of hearing about every little update I make by now. 🙂