The exploration of the first idea

In late December 2017 i was unable to sleep one night, I don't remember why. As it is often when you’re between being asleep and awake, an idea struck me. I think everyone has experienced this. Unfortunately when we don't write it down, it's gone the next morning. I got back up and sat at my desk and put the idea on a piece of paper.

Then I went back to sleep. When I woke up the next morning I found this on my desk.

2018 January

I didn't even recall the incident right away when I woke up. The Idea was to create a boardgame, where the box is a part of the gameboard. This, I thought, is interesting. I am not a boardgame designer but I played a lot when I was young. Then I got a computer and computergames seemed much more interesting at that time. Now I work on a computer everyday, as a lot of us do, and I felt a craving to create something that is playable without electronics. Something big.

I wrote many more ideas down and began to shape the game in my mind.

I found that the dimensions that I intended to use at first where too small for a game that feels big and meaningful. So I sketched it in Photoshop.

...and built a prototype with stuff that I found in my appartment.

I found that due to the plain nature of the game board it can be combined in various ways and the box creates an interesting 3D Board effect. If I could establish simple rules for setting up the gameboard, the player would get a huge amount of variation from game to game. I considered this to be a successful beginning of a little project "on the side".

I wanted the game to be a 2 player (or two teams) game. Two factions should fight it out. I put more stuff in writing and calculated, how many turns it would take to move a game piece from one side of the board to the other on various board combinations.

As the game became bigger and bigger in my head, I had to do research if something of this scale is interesting for the player community. I had to find the biggest game out there and see what the community can take in matters of scale and complexity.

Thats when I found "Kingdom Death:Monster" by Adam Poots. Sure it's not a "Player versus Player" game but when I saw the scope of the game I realized, that I don't have to hold back on my ideas. The Game was ON!