The Double Dangerous Book for Boys. Conn Iggulden

      FIELD MARSHAL – highest honorary rank.

       MAKING A BOARD GAME

      Left and right. Courtesy of The Advertising Archives

      Many of us have looked at Monopoly or Cluedo and thought, really, how hard can it be to make something like that? The answer is a little like chess: easy to begin but hard to master. Anyone can make a board game. The question is, will you be able to persuade your family or friends to learn the rules and actually play it? Still, that’s exactly how Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit started. Those remain hugely popular today. In a world of smartphones and first-person shooter games, there still seems to be a place for a small group to sit around and compete with one another for fun. In this chapter, we aren’t going to try and invent a new form of chess, go or draughts. We’ll concentrate on classic board games, like The Game of Life, Sorry! or Risk.

       THE CONCEPT

      The basic concept should be simple – even Snakes and Ladders has its fans, and that has no structure or tactics whatsoever. As it is almost two thousand years old, though, that makes a bit of sense. They hadn’t invented Chance cards then.

      Snakes and Ladders has the aim of reaching a particular square, while in Monopoly players go round and round the board as difficulty increases, until someone runs out of money. We think the second form is a better model – no ‘goal’ square, but gaining money from a finite pot. People like collecting wads of cash.

      Pick a concept your family or friends might possibly enjoy. This is important: as soon as you decide the game is called ‘Ninja Castle’, ideas will pop up. Can you win Ninja equipment? Is the basic idea to climb through the levels? Will you need a fighting system when players encounter guards? Are you an assassin, or is that too dark for a board game – and so on. If you call it, say, Poker Master, you’ll have to work out how to incorporate poker hands into a board game. Will there be betting? Will someone have to be the dealer?

      You may have a lifelong interest in orchids, but will your hobby make a good theme for a board game? Probably not – though now we’re wondering if an orchid hunt through a jungle board might just be the best idea we’ve ever had.

       MONEY

      Consider the use of money. In Monopoly, money is used to purchase tokens (houses and hotels) that make life harder for the other players. Your game ‘Orchid Adventure’ (all right, we’re just running with it now) might involve the purchase of rare flower bulbs. You could then win breeding tokens and cross-breed them to form rarer and more expensive orchids, with the aim of producing truly rare specimens that would allow you to finally build your own glasshouse in Orchid Manor.

      However, as fun as that is beginning to sound, you also need a way to disadvantage the other players. In our example, you might be able to purchase ‘Root Rot’ cards or, better still, tokens, to be left on the board like a booby-trap, or deployed against another player at a crucial moment. (That attack might be limited further by the use of a six-sided die: roll 1 or 2, the attack succeeds; 3 or 4, no result; 5 or 6, rebounds on you. That is a 1/3 or 33.3% chance of success. Learn percentages – they’re really useful for this sort of thing.)

      Money, then, is not an end in itself, but a means to an end in the game. Whatever they start with, it should be possible for a player to take some from the others – perhaps at the end of each circle of the board – and then to buy something useful with it. The Monopoly hotel piece is the model for that – a token earned or won that ruins another player’s day when he or she lands on it. In a Ninja game, you might have caltrops made from paperclips, for example.

       DISASTERS AND REWARDS

      The game shouldn’t feel too arbitrary. People like to develop tactics. Our Orchid Adventure idea has scope for any number of disasters – jungle spiders, chased back down the board by local tribes, etc: all variants of the snake in Snakes and Ladders. Yet if we are to go round and round the board (with possible trips through the jungle interior for extra risk/reward), you’ll need to incorporate small successes and failures into the game. As a side note, we learned recently of the unpleasantly large camel spider found in desert locations, which follows moving shadows, so appears to hunt people. A soldier we met described how he had to use a handgun to shoot a particularly aggressive one. The idea of a spider token that pursues a player – perhaps beginning a few squares back, with a 50/50 die roll to bring it closer or not each move – feels like a good one. Another alternative might be to have some aggressive tokens on a particular square – ghost ninjas, say, that might choose to follow any players that go past – if a 6 is rolled. Or an odd number.