The evolution of the Game Board in Treasure or Treachery

I've been digging through some old boxes to mine for social media fodder and I came across some old game board designs. I thought it might be fun to show those off so I snapped a pic and posted them to Instagram. It got me thinking about how the current version of Treasure or Treachery came about, especially the game board and map cards.

When I started working on the game I knew I wanted to incorporate a hidden information mechanic and one of the best parts of modern pirate lore is the treasure map. While this trope shows up in other genres, the combination of this and the concept of burying treasure on tropical islands is associated directly with pirates in many people's minds.

A photo posted by @|<+;0(\) Games (@aktiongames) on Apr 28, 2016 at 12:21pm PDT

I started with the idea of moving a ship to an island shore and then moving a pirate to a town. From the town there was a path the pirate must take to get to the X on the board and get treasure. They would then try to move back to town to stow the treasure and try to collect two more. There was also combat, although instead of the dice rolls used now, there was a card battle system that had you drawing a hand of attacks and defenses and playing those like a game of war.

At this point, there was no hidden information component, and there was little interaction because of the shape of the board, the placement of the goals, and the poor card battle system. Naval combat never happened. At this time I was thinking of the board as the treasure map, and this concept of the board as a map would heavily influence the later design, especially the aesthetic direction, but I hadn't hit on the idea of map cards yet.

Early iterations of the game board before the island format.

After a few iterations with X's on the board the idea came up about Map Cards. It was the first big breakthrough for the game play and turned into a super fun mechanic. You can see an early version of the board in the picture above, on the right. That was one of the first iterations of the game board with map cards.

The player would move the ship to shore and the pirate across the beach to town. In town they'd get a map card and could move at a slower pace through the woods to the treasure location. Each card had different style X corresponding to the style of X on the game board and you had to match them up to find the spot to dig.

Later, when the island game board design came about, the X's remained on the board but lost their distinct styles. Instead you'd simply match the X on the board to the X + location of the map cards. Even with the X's on the board there were a few problems... mainly that players would often get confused or have a hard time finding their treasure location. The game was starting to move from functional to fun and I was encouraged to press on.

A photo posted by @|<+;0(\) Games (@aktiongames) on May 2, 2016 at 12:00pm PDT

Once I started to feel more comfortable with some of the movement and treasure mechanics I realized the shape of the board was prohibitive to driving interaction between players. At this time players mostly avoided one another. I wanted conflict. It was also at this time that I began to seek a focus for the game beyond the thematic pirate tropes and decided I wanted something that was fast and fun, combined a little strategy, a little tactics, a little luck. I had initially been focused on something closer to a tabletop strategy game (part of the reason for hexes on the board) but as time went on we realized that faster was more fun for a broader audience. 

My initial playtesters were all family and friends, none of whom had spent anytime whatsoever playing tabletop war games. They wanted simpler mechanics and were not driven to conflict. I set about to redesign the board to introduce more conflict and after some thought and research I decided on the design of the four corners with the island in the middle. I wanted the island to look organic, and the first few designs, printed out on my inkjet across 6 pages to get to the full 20x20 inch square, all had the X's printed on the game board.

Early game board prototype that was rendered in Bryce 3D

At this point the board did not have the decals all across it. No giant squid, no adorable seahorse. It was difficult to find the location on the board from the map card. I had worked hard to make every single one unique, but small differences were sometimes hard to spot. So we put a compass rose on the map cards, still confusion. 

At the time I was playing the video game "Red Dead Redemption". The game has a map screen and if you zoom out far enough decals of different animals appear all over the map: deer, armadillo, horses, etc.. In game these designate where you can find that animal in abundance for hunting. 

I applied this idea to the game board and map cards, viola! Problem solved, folks can now find their way using their own dead reckoning and more importantly we could remove the X's from the game board without confusing players. It was a long process but we finally had a map card mechanic that worked great and was fun to play.

A photo posted by @|<+;0(\) Games (@aktiongames) on Apr 18, 2016 at 7:09pm PDT

Now that we had a functional board that drove conflict and provided a compelling mechanic for generating the excitement of a treasure hunt with a fun seek and find meta-game we could focus on polishing up the experience. With the new focus on speed, and at this point the card battle system having been replaced with the current attack or steal dice-based combat, the game was getting fast and fun. There were still a few little problems with the board and game play. 

• Initially, the green areas around the mountains slowed your pirate down by -1. This slowed the game down tremendously and discouraged players from traversing the board. This rule was removed to speed up the game and make it more fun. We left the green space in for aesthetic and thematic reasons. 
  
  
• The shape of the board in some areas and the position of some of the cities and ports conferred some advantage to some of the starting positions over others. Moving things around and paying close attention to space counts and choke points fixed these problems. 
  
  
• We also added the pirate and ship token spaces near the home spaces to help track the location of treasure as it moves throughout the game.
  
  
• The map cards were re-balanced to ensure a fair distribution relative to each pirate's home space.

I should note that all of this occurred over several months, some of the changes and refinements coming even a year or more later as I iterated over the design and playtested with family, friends, and strangers. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my family and friends who helped test Treasure or Treachery with me all these years. It would truly not be the game it is today without their contributions, ideas, patience, and of course their imaginations!

A photo posted by @|<+;0(\) Games (@aktiongames) on Apr 17, 2016 at 10:01am PDT

For the Kickstarter edition we are going to refine the board and map card art, and make some tweaks along the way fixing a few minor problems that remain in the design. For example, distinguishing ports and towns with clearer color coding and making ports look more blue so they are associated with ship movement spaces. While the overall aesthetic will remain, we'll make improvements like adding in town and port names, adding location names to the map cards, and other goodies to fill out the thematic presentation and give our backers a high-quality, fun, playable game they can enjoy for years to come!

Any tips on designing game boards? Is there something you'd like to hear more about? What do you think of the map cards? Let me know in the comments!