Personal aims

Player’s goal:

Reach the finish point, which is the center of the map.

My design goal:

Create a game that spreads the responsibility of randomness and movement over the other board game components, which are, role cards and terrain cards.

Experience goal:

Combined with the ranking of the twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac story (a unique Chinese way of indicating the time of birth, equivalent to the twelve signs of the zodiac in the West) (the rat, the ox, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog and the pig), players can randomly select animals to experience the story in which the gods held the animals race competition to determine their ranking.

Thought about randomness

The biggest problem with board games without dice is the lack of randomness. When discussing this brief with a friend, he brought up an interesting question: if all the elements that affect movement in a board game are called dice, is the removal of dice intended to remove randomness, or is it just a matter of giving dice a different form?
If the dynamics of a video game are enforced by the player, then the dynamics of a board game are largely enforced by the dice. What is infinite in a video game, with keystroke-controlled displacement, becomes a finite number of action points in a board game, and this finite number of action points is determined by the dice in a traditional board game. so if I take away the object that has the task of generating randomness, I need to put that responsibility on other tabletop game components, such as characters and maps.

Imagine a situation where a character’s ability can determine how it moves, and terrain can determine whether the character can move.
Different roles have different movement abilities (some are fast, some are slow), but there is a corresponding system of restraints, which can be either numerical restraints or restraints between the character’s attributes and the terrain.
1. Numerical restraint: Fast movers have a low stamina value, slow movers have a high stamina value
2. Attribute restraint: Terrain cards can be divided into three types: land, sea, and air, and if the character is a rat, he can move on the road, but not in the sea or air.

Early-stage prototype

Cards:

1. Role cards:

The rat, the ox, the tiger, the rabbit, the dragon, the snake, the horse, the goat, the monkey, the rooster, the dog and the pig.

2. Terrain cards:  

        a. Land: Plain, thorns, forests;

        b. Beneath the surface: River, Swamp, rock;

        c. Air : cloudy, normal.

Critical reflection

I refer to the traditional tabletop game variety of dice-determined movement distances as movement distance randomness based on the same map, so in this proposition, I try to achieve double randomness (different characters have different displacement abilities and terrain restrictions) for random characters based on a random map (the map consists of a patchwork of different hexagonal map tiles).

After playtesting, I realized that the sky card needs further consideration, as only the dragon can fly among the characters and is one of the fastest moving characters, although with the addition of the cloudy card for it, does the grid occupied by the cloudy card have any other effect on the other animals in the actual playthrough?

After that, I also came up with a mountain-style map design, similar to the Zuma game, but with height on the elevation as well. This type of level requires players to start at the same starting point and progress from the outermost circle of the level towards the middle, the first player who managed to reach the end of the middle wins. This type of map incorporates a layer height mechanic, meaning that it may go through several layers from the start to the end, and certain characters, such as rabbits, can move across the layers, but it will require more corresponding restrictions to keep the game fair.