Final Gameboard

We are officially done and ready to print and glue onto cardboard. The cards are also all made and mostly cut out. We may laminate them or leave them alone.

Latest Gameboard

Game board

Today is the play testing day and we're doing last-minute layout tweaks. I had printed the image out using MS Publisher which ended up dividing the game board into nine pages—about five more than I had really wanted. This makes it a lot more annoying to assemble. The final version will NOT be printed on Publisher unless I can get clear directions on how Publisher decides its image slicing when printing posters.

We're adding some more features onto the board, such as a fence, and tentatively putting down all of the game space labels. They have not been added to the Photoshop document yet because I didn't want to add them until I was sure what they should be. They'll inflate the file a lot and could get confusing to work through. It's a lot easier to write on the labels by hand onto the draft board until we're confident that each space is labeled correctly.

The mud space has come back into contention. We ended up putting five spaces on the bridge and four stones. The one extra bridge space may turn into a "stuck in the mud, miss a turn" space depending on how our play-testers react. Right now Krisoula and Heather are assembling some specific questions we want our play testers to address including:

1. Do you like the idea of having a "stuck in the mud" lose a turn space?
2. Please edit our rules—add anything or cross out any unnecessary words!
3. Did you unerstand form the rules that there are only two animals allowed on the board at one time?

Hopefully this will prove helpful and improve our game.

Progress

Today was very productive. We really focused in on what we want our gameboard to look like and figured out that we will use lillypads (sp? hahaha) and boats to go along with our water and island theme. We also decided that any 3D elements are not going to be permanently attached to the board, this way the game is easy to replicate and easy to fold away. Me and Yolanda created a lot of Lillypad Rules, which will keep the game interesting and fun. We also started coming up with Trivia type questions. Meanwhile, Dan and Heather worked on revising the directions and making them clear.

So the two players will hop along stepping stones until they get to an island, which will have the Battle and Trivia area. Water will be majority of the board. Lillypad rules will be in the shape of lillypads and can be changed up as the game progresses. The boat will hold Trivia cards to test the players math and spelling skills.

I am going to go to AC Moore over the break and pick up several packs of animal figures for our playing pieces.

Gameboard Prototype

Krisoula and I have worked on a prototype of the gameboard. We have had to rethink the entire 3D concept and are looking at making better 2D images to represent the things we had wanted to put in 3D.

The color-coded squares represent the different special things like a trivia square.

(Click the image to see a bigger version)