Digitally enhanced boardgame - Part 1: The dungeon tiles
Welcome to this blog post series about a dungeon boardgame enhanced with some digital magic.
What kind of game?
Something like a dungeon crawler :)
The dungeon
I want the dungeon to be random, which is not too hard to achieve procedurally, but how will the players be able to see the dungeon?
Playing on a notebook screen was my first thought but I quickly discarded the idea because a notebook screen is just too small.
Using a projector would be awesome but also very expensive and hard to set up (for me at least).
Thus I ended up with the fact that the board should be made up of cardboard, more specifically: cardboard tiles that can be rearranged randomly.
Players will pull a tile from a stack when exploring the dungeon and connect it to the tile they are currently on.
What kind of dungeon?
The simplest design I can come up with is that a tile always has one entry and 0-3 exits. This means that there are 8 variations plus a start tile with 4 exits:
Next up I needed to find out how many of each tile variation should be in the stack that will be used to build the dungeon. I chose a crude bruteforce approach and wrote a little program that builds a dungeon with a given stack of tiles 10000 times and check the results.
Things I learned from that:
- having 3 or more dead end cards means a dungeon can be un-expandable after 4 turns
- same for too many right/left turns
So I added a simple rule: if the dungeon is closed after placing the tile, try again.
What will be inside the dungeon?
Before the game starts, the server generates an array of rooms, one for each physical tile that could be placed. The server also generates chests, some unlocked, some with keys and throws those randomly into the rooms.
When a tile is explored, the server takes a room out of the array and shows the player what is inside. This information is only known by the server and displayed on the phone of the player on that tile.
There will also be monsters, but instead of being pre-generated there is a chance for a monster spawn each time a tile is explored, the player can the choose to fight the monster or run away.
If there is a chest in the room the player can try to open the chest, this will make a noise through the phone's speakers if the chest is locked and the player does not have the right key, this way other players with a key have a chance to head to the room to loot it!
The Goal
The goal for the player is to steal one of the valuable treasures inside the dungeon and return to the start tile.
As soon as a player leaves the dungeon the game ends in 4 turns where each of these turns the dungeon collapses a bit more (frequent monster spawns, limited movement, traps) until the final sudden-death round.
After that, the items inside the player's inventory give points and the player with the most points wins the game!
CodingKiwi