Sunday 8 March 2015

Royal Game of Ur - parts of a redesign document

So recently we have been tasked to make a design document of an ancient game of our choice.
If you've read my previous posts on my blog you'll probably guess that I chose The Royal Game of Ur to redesign and change, this is what I've come up with:

The board layout


First of all I decided to keep the layout found by Leonard Woolley in the royal cemetry of Ur. However, I decided to add an extra tile/space to show the player where they need to get to to finish.
Without the rules this looks very easy as it looks as if you'd only need to move 6 spaces and you're at the finish, however, I added a circle at the opposite end of the board which the players must pass in order to be able to land on the 'Finish' tile. This way players would have to navigate around the whole board rather than leaving any spaces out.

The reason why the finish area is not a proper tile is because I'd rather it be only an indicator for the player to reach, as the original game is nicknamed as 'The game of 20 Squares' I wanted to keep it that way, therefore the finish space only acts as a guide for the player to land on in order to finish with their pieces.

The assets

Again, I've gone with using a 6 sided dice for moving the pieces around the board.

The pieces themselves have been colour coordinated to show who's piece is who. Their colour matches the coloured arrows on the board above to show the direction the player must go towards. Also the back of the pieces have dots on, like the original pieces have. This is so that when the player reaches/passes the circle they must flip their piece over to reveal the dotted side which shows that their piece is heading to the finish space and to prevent confusion over whether the piece is heading to the circle or to the finish.

Pieces are shown below:

The rules

In an actual design document I'd show the rules first, since this is a blog post I wanted to show them after showing the pieces, this is in hope that anyone who has read the above posts would get a rough idea of how to play and what they need to do, with the rules only covering the gaps.






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