Title Page for University.

Ba1

Board Games

Benjamin Everington


http://smtboardgame.blogspot.com/

Thoughts on group work... the terrible truth.

Group work was a great way to get to quickly know members of my course and create friendships with people I may not have initially approached. Working in a group did have it's trouble though. the number one issue was I found certain members had no initiative and relied on me and a few other key members to organize everything for them, and even coming and asking things that should have been asked earlier into the project, delaying our work and disrupting productivity. There were even members who failed to produce any work at all from what I saw, and prove to be generally hard to get in contact with. Another area I had issue with is members not sticking to the original design agreements and doing art work that simply did not end up fitting into the scheme of the game. I would like to note Chris Green for covering alot more than he should of off of his own back just to cover mistakes that were made, and Sarah Fletcher for the amazing amount of rules she created.

Everything good ends with tentacles...

Following the same basic principles as the Sharks, this is the finished colouring of my octopus!

Sharks! Arrgghhh!

The finished coloring of my earlier sketches, done as added work for the artists to include in anything they may need them for. The style is very cartoon influenced, which the group decided on, and I have stuck with bold colours to appeal to the target audiences.

Box Art.

A quick blank template designed to help the artists and lower their workloads, the background is a free stock paper imaged edited by me to look like an old map paper.

Take a chance!

Various chance cards, rules were developed by Sarah Fletcher and the cards were developed by me.

Final Pieces of the Puzzle!

The finished pieces!

Pieces of.......... for the board game.

After assigning every member different areas of the task to develop, I came out with designing the game pieces. Designing the games pieces was a challenging task requiring me to take in various different things into consideration. The first being a material suitable for the age groups playing the game, after deliberation I settled with a non toxic oven based clay, making it safer for younger audiences, but because the clay came in various colours it was still appealing to the target audience. After testing the clay, I ran into my second problem being it wasn’t suitable for making small ships like I had originally planned, so I went back to the drawing board and came out with these skull sketches.

Everything's better with tentacles........

Another quick pen sketch done for the game. This time and octopus that could be a boss NPC. Would also be the leader of the earlier Shark pirates I drew.

Pegleg..... what is that!?!?!

Here is a concept for a simple shark pirate type NPC, maybe to fill in with other artwork or to be used in the actual game itself. After my early market research and who a game of this nature would be aimed towards, I've kept the artwork simple and appealing whilst at the same time catering for a mix of different age ranges in the 8+ category we are using as our target audience. This is also the direction the group have decided to go with the project's artwork.

Shiver me Timbers!

Sarah came to us with the idea of a pirate board game, after deliberation we all decided to spend a few days researching ideas and initial concepts for rule/characters etc.

Battleships

Paper version of the game, very basic, can be dawn up with a simple pen and paper. This makes the game very accessible and free. The game was known around this period of time and published as the pen and paper game by the Milton Bradley Company.

Here the game has been marketed in a good old American family style, using visuals from the 50’s/ early 60’s. The father and son sitting enjoying a game after dinner whilst the mother and daughter do the washing up and laugh along with the men in the household. This is very interesting as it shows popular culture incorporated into mainstream retail products, really stereo typing the times in its visuals. 

Later versions of battle ships I have found seem to use young players playing the actual game on the boxes, obviously the age the product aims itself at is 8-14 years range. It’s very interesting how target audiences are portrayed in artwork and how different companies/artists go about getting that across in the finished products. Fonts and colours are also changing, again with the times.

Version of battleships that has been made to incorporate the movie G.I.JOE, the rise of the cobra. The game is obviously very versatile and other variants, be it themes, or other forms of movie etc promotion can be used and still be viable or in relation to the original game itself.

The most recent version of battleships I could find, in a Langley’s in Norwich. The physical game has not changed from the one above in most respects and the imagery used on the box stays the same in theme to other boxes. It is very interesting to note how the earlier version of the game (the 50’s box) is the only box that seems a lot different to the others. The more recent boxes don’t seem to depict the cultures that they were made for as much as the earlier box. 

Battleship Rules

The game is played over four grids, two for each player. The grids are typically square and are in 10x10 within a grid, individual squares on the grid are identified by letters and numbers. One grid is used to arrange ships and record the opponent’s shots, whilst the other is used to record their own shots.

Before the game begins, each player arranges their ships secretly and the objective of the game is to correctly sink the other player’s ships before the opponent sinks theirs. Ships can be arranged horizontally or vertically, and how many squares a ship occupies depends on the type of ship. Ships can not overlap or occupy the same squares at the same time.

After each player places their ships, they take turns announcing a target square in an opponent’s grid that they wish to shoot at. If a ship is in the announced square, then it is hit and the opponent must declare a hit, then take his/her turn. When all the squares of a player’s ship are hit, the ship is sunk. After all of one opponent’s ships have been sunk, the game ends and the other player wins.

A slightly different version of the game is played in India. Instead of announcing whether a shot is a hit or miss immediately, the players simply say how many of their opponent's three shots were hits and if so on what kind of vessel. This allows for more strategy in game-play and loosens the game's dependency on luck. A slightly different recording system is used in this variation as there is a new importance on what turn a player hit something on. The ships themselves are also slightly different; the Indian version uses two submarines (two spaces long), two destroyers (three spaces long), one battleship (five spaces long), and one aircraft carrier (five spaces arranged in a 'T' pointing in any direction).

Platform Variations

• Electronic Battleship: Advanced Mission published for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, and ZX Spectrum.
• Risk / Battleship / Clue, for the Game Boy Advance.
• Battleship / Connect Four / Sorry! /Trouble for the Nintendo DS.
• Monopoly / Boggle / Yahtzee / Battleship for the Nintendo DS.
• Hasbro Family Game Night for Playstation 2 and Nintendo Wii.

The Playstation 2 and Wii versions change the rules slightly including the size of the grid (8 x 12 in the NES version, 8 x 8 in the Game Boy version), size of ships (it is common to feature a submarine that takes up only a single square) and special shot missiles for each ship (for example, in the NES version the cruiser has a 5-shot missile which strikes 5 squares in an X pattern on the grid in one turn. Submarine-tracking sonar and aerial reconnaissance to spot ships are also features).

Ancient Board Games

When did people start playing games?

Reference: http://www.ccgs.com/games/index.htm (28/09/10)

 Games can fall under many different categories but not everything is relevant to board games. I would assume people would have started playing games as soon as any kind of leisure time would come up in their lives. Take babies for example, a natural paternal instinct is to keep the baby happy with basic games such as peek-a-boo and latter in an infants life with Hide and seek. Games seem to be a part of human nature, and are a useful educational source, as well as fun.

 The earliest board game to date is "The Royal Game of Ur" -- which was discovered in 1926 – 1927 by Sir Leonard Woolley in royal tombs in what is now Iraq.

The following rules are taken from http://www.ccgs.com/games/ur.htm (28/09/10)

Design, and How The Royal Game of UR is Played

The game board consists of three rows of eight squares, with two squares -- the fifth and sixth on the top and bottom -- left out.  The board is marked with rosettes.

The games found in the city of UR were accompanied by pyramidical dice, each one with a corner shaved flat -- and each with two of its four corners decorated or inlaid in some way to make them stand out.  When rolled, each die thus had a fifty-fifty chance of coming up "marked" or "unmarked" -- an unusual configuration and method, then or now, when we would use the flip of a coin. Each game had six dice -- two sets, one for each player -- and the rolling of three dice would then give four possible outcomes: one marked, two marked, three marked or no marked sides, representing moves of one, two, three or (no marks) four spaces. Four marks allowed not only a move, but another roll.
 Fourteen playing pieces in two different colors -- seven for each player -- are moved around the board according to the throw of the dice (although some versions have five per player) -- with the object being to bear all your pieces off the board first.  Rules written in cuneiform on tablets dating back to about 200 B.C. have provided most of the rules for the game of that time, except that there was no explanation of the direction of travel, so that still leaves room for some discussion as to how the game was played.  The most common rules have pieces remaining on their own side of the board when not sharing the middle. The more logical is based on the distance between the rosettes marking the board and the maximum possible distance moved with a throw of the three dice -- four spaces. 
 Using the latter rules, the two colors first enter the board above the middle rosette on opposite sides -- black on the top, white on the bottom. They then head along to the rosette on their path on the long side of the board, then turn and return across the middle. Thus they start off alone on their path, and only meet conflict with the opponent when the pieces trek along the middle track; if a roll allows the player to land a piece occupied by the opponent's, then that piece is off the board and must start over -- with the exception of pieces resting on squares marked by rosettes -- they are safe and cannot be knocked off.  Once the pieces cross the narrow middle bridge, they then follow a looping path around the small end -- first heading for the rosette on the opponent's side and then around the end squares to the rosette on their own side of the board, from which point they can bear off the board (exact throws are not required).
The popular version of the game has pieces remaining on their own sides or on the middle track -- not crossing in the final portion to the opponent's side -- but this makes for less exciting conflict and also less sense in terms of the distance from one rosette to the next.

Mah Jongg

Mah Jongg is an ancient Chinese game, which throughout history has been adapted by many different countries/cultures. The original game itself is said to be 4000+ years old.

The game started as paper cards but was eventually adapted into a stone or wooden “tile”. The game itself was only for the aristocracy and the rules were not disclosed until China became a republic early in the last century, which I would assume would mean the game could have been played illegally amongst the common people and would have had many different sets of rules.

Mah Jongg wasn’t played outside of china until 1920, when it was taken and played in America and eventually spread over the world.

Dice Games

Maybe before board games, dice or games involving stones, seeds, animal bones and other round items were used as a form of entertainment.

Old examples include;

Dice made from the knuckle bones of Sheep or Goats, rolled on to a flat surface that would land one of four ways and valued at 1, 3, 4 and 6. This would have certainly been an early way to keep scores or even a very early way to gamble.

Another example would be using dice to move pieces along a board, with the dice number being how far you move along the board. This is very similar to Snakes and ladders. These types of games would have obviously evolved around the cultures playing adding in obstacles and other variants that would make the game more interesting and prolong the playing experience, making varied types of playing experiences depending on the players wants or timescales.

Into the fray...

Well my first uni project sets me in a group designing an original boardgame, and I get made leader >.>. We all decided to go off today and start researching existing games and come back after this first week with ideas for our own game.