Titanomachina Development: How to Lose the Board

Of the many, many things in this project that have vexed me, the boards perhaps have vexed me the most. It's difficult to get things projected at the right sizing for the intended printing, although I think what vexes me the most about it is that I have had successes, followed by what I might call 'failures.' 

The first board I ordered worked perfectly, possibly because I hadn't attempted to mangle the artwork and the artist I had commissioned had quite proficiently made it usable 'as is.' The second, 6x6 board, worked out fine but it was just a cropping of the original art. A further printing where I had attempted to alter the artwork proved un-usable as I hadn't sized the art properly and so the printers faithfully printed it to the altered size. So in order to pursue this option I need to either hire a graphic designer, which isn't in the budget, or learn to prepare images properly myself, which still has a cost to me in personal time. How much, I couldn't tell you, and that's a concern at the outset.

Trying a different tack, I commissioned some new art, and eventually had it produced. The problem, such as it was, was that the manufacturer had actually gone up and above the requirements, making me some PVC matt boards that could be combined to make a bigger board. That the squares were slightly larger to the grid extended out to the edge of 18" was not a problem. It was actually a mild benefit given that the cards were 50mm, and the extra fraction of 1m looked alright. The second set I ordered, hoping they would turn out the same without describing the additional requirement, were not made to tesselate. They were, however, perfectly on spec, which is both again on me and another cost in both time and money to fix.  

However, I have had some lucky with the road tiles that I originally commissioned. These printed out nicely, and being double-sided a Roundabout and a Road gave players access to all the road tiles they would need for all but the bleakest boards in a set of 48. Some issues with the graphic design I had commissioned meant that I learned to make sufficient artwork for my purposes, adding two new road tile sides, for T-junction and L-bend. Now, limiting the relative quantities of these tiles would affect the game out of the board, but I'm reasonably confident that players don't need more than 48 road tiles in the basic game. 

Of course, this line of thought brought me to wonder why not to include more than the 48 sweet spot for manufacturing an optimal number of tiles. What if, for example, players wanted to cover the board in roads? They would need 81 for that, since the board is a 9x9 grid, a 1-18 track, and if I could make the artwork play nicely, a 1-6 track. But playing on the PVC matt boards made me improvise ways of tracking the game rounds and initiative, which don't strictly need tracks. The game rounds, for instance, can be tracked around two edges of the board, in a hilariously Monopoly-style journey. The initiative tokens can be set up in a row with player assent as to its clarity. It has me thinking about ways to combine the initiative and the game arounds, and getting rid of the deadline marker would be one less un-necessary component. 

But being able to cover the board means covering the board, and if you've covered the board, then in a vague sense you don't really need the board, just the cover. I've also been somewhat inspired by both Carcassonne and Keys to the Castle. So where would those other, at minimum 33, tiles come from? Why not tiles for placing buildings on top of them? Roads can't have buildings, and that means buildings are kind of sunk into the board relative to the Titans standing on roads. Plus, and this is something I rather want to emphasize, this makes craters out of the negative space where a tile is not placed (or is removed). 

It's not like making a board out of tiles is a particularly new idea, but it is a good idea if you can take the tiles to behave, which means they need to tesselate. Plus there's the requirement that the roads themselves need to connect properly, with other roads or the edge, and that's easily enough extended to cover these 'foundation' tiles. 

It also enables implementation of an idea that I had previously abandoned because things needed to be fast and simple for a mass audience, rather than intuitive and interesting for the mass audience, wherein players could start anywhere on an empty board, but discovered buildings and roads as they walked over and around them (and used their sensors, with the building number being a cap on building scoring). 

So what I'm going to do is order some more tiles, adjust the mix to be 48 Road/Roudabout tiles, 16 T-junction/L-bend tiles, and 32 building tiles. 

In the meantime I think I want to consider how to drop the deadline marker...