New Game, Board Game: Empire Domination: Mediterranean

Rules and Map

Start Up and Gameplay

Mercenaries, Technology, and Cities

Civilizations

This past week I transformed a fairly clunky google docs game my friend (CV) and I had created into a real life board game. The google docs version my friend and I had created was called Empire's Challenge. The google docs game is based around a capital city that each player starts with and then expands out of. Armies and ships are used to facilitate land grabs and attacks. The game has a randomizing characteristic with a die roll at the beginning of the turn facilitating events like barbarian invasions, plague, forts builds, and opportunities to take more land are created on certain rolls. The goal of the game is to eventually capture the enemy's capital city. One of the most interesting parts of the game was the exchangeable map. Any map of any region or fantasy region could be used because all the capital cities were drawn on the map in a good docs drawing.

The main problem with this game was how clunky it was. Using good docs drawings to draw every change on the board, or new region was time restrictive and it was easy to make mistakes changing the board so often. In the end, compared to many other computer games out there, like Age of Empires, this game did not stand up. It's clumsiness led to games that would take a long time to finish without being worth it in gameplay.

Recently this summer I decided to fix the game I liked the idea of starting an empire from scratch with very little resources. I also enjoyed the fact of exchangeable maps to keep gameplay new. Due to these interesting points, and an additional abundance of time being the summer I decided to remake the game. Instead of it being online, I made it into a board game. The game could be played quicker and more effectively in real life, with a tiny scroller being replaced by opposable thumbs and fingers. For this new board game I wanted the first map to based around ancient Mediterranean civilizations. I have always loved Mediterranean civilizations, and this new game seemed like it could lend itself to many players, similar to games like Risk and Diplomacy. The ancient Mediterranean was a very diverse area with many different cultures and civilizations spawning around it. In addition, the Mediterranean Sea created a great bastion for ship movement as well as having enough land area where armies could move overland just fine. The central location of the sea on the map would create situations where almost any civilization played would have to use ships to a degree for success, which was a key part of the original game. The map felt perfect in how it benefited players who would want to use both land and naval troops.

Very essential to the story behind the development of this game is the fact that I only had a rough outline on how I wanted this new game to be played while making the board. The things I knew I wanted for sure were the first map to be the Mediterranean, and that the game would have naval and land-based influences and uses. One other thing I was fairly certain about, but not dead set on, was that I wanted the ability to create forts which could be created in regions to help fortify their location. These forts helped me come up with my first main theme of the game. After settling on them for the most part I came to the realization that I wanted a game where a player could invest resources into a location to make it better only for it to be stolen by someone else and for that player to get the resources. A fort added this because a player could make one and then another player could take it for themselves.

At this point, I started the creation of the game board. To help create the map I used a large foam board, graphite paper, eight printed pictures of various parts of the Mediterranean, and paint. I laid the graphite paper over the foam board, and then put the eight printed pictures together to form the Mediterranean. Using a pencil I then sketched over the printed pictures which left an imprint of the Mediterranean on the board. Next, I painted the water areas blue. At this point, I chose the nations I wanted to include in the game Carthage, Rome, Seleucid Empire, Ptolemaic Egypt, Gaul, and Macedonia. For each of these nations, I used a stencil to make a painted yellow star where the capitals were located. The picture at the top of this post is what the map has become at this point.

Next Part... More board development and rules.