Board game: Dragon's Gold

I challenged myself to design a board game that was skill based, and used real physics as a game play mechanic. I started the design process by gathering a bunch of small objects of various shapes and sizes and a chess board. I had chess pieces, marbles, wooden cubes, and a pile a change. I sat there and played with the different objects, like a kid might do, just observing how they moved and interacted. I would try to get something interesting to happen, and then make up rules. I stacked a bunch of quarters and flicked another quarter at the stack and saw that I could knock quarters out of the stack without knocking the whole stack over. I kept flicking coins at the stack, knocking out one after the other, and it got shorter and shorter. Sometimes the stack would shift when a coin was knocked out, becoming unstable, so that on the next flick of the coin it would topple over. There was enough happening here to make a whole game around it I thought. I would gradually refine the rules and game board over about 8 months.

The game board went through many redesigns and name changes. I was originally calling it stack attack, then column crash, dueling column, then finally dragon's gold.

The first board was drawn and colored by hand using drafting tools. I used the cardboard back of a sketch pad. I then bought a sheet of clear vellum and some decorative wood trimming to make the board. The glue I used to paste the vellum to the board, melted the marker color and smudged it pretty badly once I had glued it down. I might have been done with this project but that accident made me want to remake the whole thing digitally and not worry about messing up many hours worth of work.

And Here's the redesign I did with Inkscape, which is basically an open-source copy-cat of Illustrator. I got the graphic printed as a laminated poster and pasted it to a wooden board. I then added wooden walls around the center region (painted bright green) to keep the coins from flying off the board.

Up until this point I had not considered selling the game, but people seemed to really like playing it so I had to think about how a consumer who has never met me might think of the game. My art style and theme choices were basically whatever I though looked cool and I had little regard for creating a coherent theme or visual narrative. So the next thing to do was to come up with a story for what was happening in the game. This would mean I would have to, yet again, redesign the game board...

I drew another handmade version of the game, this time on high quality paper, inked it, and scanned it into the computer. I then traced the drawing in Inkscape to come up with what you saw at the start of this post. All in all the project took a huge amount of time, but it was worth it, the final product really does look like something one would buy at a store.