Wesnoth as a board game

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Turuk
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Turuk »

Czestmyr wrote:Hey guys! The idea is far from being dead (at least if you asked me)
Says the man whose thread has been missing work for 5 months. ;)

Have you thought of finding another to move your work forward since you are busy with RL? As others have posted here with interest about the project.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Turuk (And others as well),

you are free to continue if you have any ideas that could move the project further. This is not Elricz's or my project. It should be a collective effort. All you need should already be here on the boards. If it's not, write me an email or PM.

P.S.: Don't take it personally but everyone can criticise, but how many people actually did something meaningful for the WBG? I think, one could count them with fingers on one hand.

Best regardz,

CZestmyr

Edit: OK. My bad - My assets are only on my harddrive. I need to release them here.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Turuk »

I am personally not interested, but I was only posting to encourage you to make the above offer, so that anyone new or old who comes to this thread has an idea of how to pick it up if the want to help out. ;)
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Turuk wrote:I am personally not interested, ...
Ah, I was afraid of that...
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Update - I am currently working on units for the board game. But they need to be balanced - preferably by changing their cost in gold. This will be difficult because they have to be modified to suit the needs of the board game - less HPs, less damage, etc... I tried to figure some formula myself but even if it is correct, there's a lot of variables that I could have set wrong and to correct them, I would need a lot of playtesting, which would be more cumbersome than with the computer game. So, if you are experienced in game balancing or have an idea how to resolve this problem, your help would be very appreciated.

I have already contacted the main developer (Dave) of Wesnoth and asked him about how this was done in the original game but I'm afraid that too many people bother him with PMs so he doesn't reply to them anymore.

Edit: I have uploaded the board game assets to http://czestmyr.wz.cz/wbg_assets.tar.gz
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Thrawn »

If you want to talk to dave, the #wesnoth-dev channel on irc is a good place.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Thanks for the tip, Thrawn, but he already replied.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Just a quick bump to let anyone interrested know that I'm doing progress. I made three factions - Rebels, Loyalists and Undead - each with 6 units from the original game. The reduced number of units for each faction will also mean that it will be much more difficult to balance the factions against each other, but there's probably no other way. The game will have to be rebalanced either way. I could really use the Java simulator now. I would write it myself, but I have a lot of other (school) programming projects right now.

I am also trying to cut hexes out of 2mm cardboard. It's very difficult to cut, but the pieces are sturdy, almost can't be bent and they fit together nicely. I will then have to print out the terrain tiles on normal paper and glue them to the hexes. See the photo.
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Cardboard hex tiles for the WBG
Cardboard hex tiles for the WBG
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by gio.longoni »

Czestmyr wrote:I am also trying to cut hexes out of 2mm cardboard. It's very difficult to cut, but the pieces are sturdy, almost can't be bent and they fit together nicely. I will then have to print out the terrain tiles on normal paper and glue them to the hexes. See the photo.
I suggest to print and glue a whole A4 *before* cutting hexes, when possible. I noticed using thicker paper (160 g/m2) for printing worked a little better when I glued it; maybe it's just due to the glue I was using. Once I cut some small rectangular pawns out of 2 mm cardboard. Difficult, indeed; and with hexagons I imagine it requires even much more time.
It might be worth searching some alternatives. On this site they sell ready made cardboard hexes:

http://www.muecke-hotelberatung.de/spie ... xagons.htm

though I think they are too expensive. Not worth, for the first prototypes of the game, in my opinion. Maybe worth if you need a lot of them, e.g.: 500 of the 35mm ones (cutting more than 100 hexes would be way too much painful). And you need to order a lot of material at once if you want to optimize shipping costs.
Another useful thing you might be able to find in shops near you are A4 blank stickers, for printing and sticking without having to use glue, like these:

http://www.spielmaterial.de/english/ind ... A41170.htm

3 months ago I bought from this site 1000 wooden disks 35mm diameter and 10mm thick: they have no more in stock and were selling these last 1000 for just 50 euros, so I decided to order them; I bought also 50 of the A4 stickers.
The idea is to print Wesnoth BG unit pawns on the stickers and stick them on the wooden disks, though I must admit I'm not investing enough time in the project. Here is a picture of the disks

Image

So, for the map, I'm thinking about 35 to 40 mm wide hexes (smallest videogame's multiplayer maps would be huge enough for a boardgame also with such small hexes... of course in the boardgame smaller unit movements may require smaller maps than the videogame, but I think the smallest videogame's ones should be our target, to have just enough "terrain variety").
Last edited by gio.longoni on February 27th, 2009, 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Czestmyr »

Wow, great site, Gio! Thanks for the tip.

Edit: the basic set of hexes is now finished. The hexes are 4 cm (1.6 in) in diameter, which means each side of a hex measures 2cm. I tried to create a small map out of them. I also bought some figures in a local game shop. The only thing remaining is create the unit cards, prepare some HP and gold tokens (as for the XP, I'm going to leave it out of the first revision of the game), print out unit labels for the figures (I thought about how to do that already) and PLAY!!!
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A prepared map waiting to be played.
A prepared map waiting to be played.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Dragonchampion »

Very, Very nice. I am a board game designer myself, so let me give you a tip: Don't try to get Hasbro or anyone to publish it. They do not accept ideas outside thier offices; I know, because I tried with a stock game I made. You need to get a good printer and lots of paper, and publish and make it yourself, unless you can find someone to do it for you.

Keep going; It looks REALLY good, only I would like to see D&D style tokens for the characters.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by ancestral »

It does look really, really nice. However, I fear that there would be just too many hexes to have a reasonably-sized map (50? 100? How many would you need?)

I suggest having larger pieces composing of 7 hexes (one in the middle and one on each side) so it would be easier to build the map with the smaller hexes drawn in. Also, it would allow to have slightly more unique and overlapping art between hexes, and might help with bridges and rivers which always require certain types of water/bridge tiles.
Wesnoth BestiaryPREVIEW IT HERE )
Unit tree and stat browser
CanvasPREVIEW IT HERE )
Exp. map viewer
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Dragonchampion »

Just like HeroScape! Bingo!

Just make them so that they lock together, or they will go everywhere.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

One way to get them to lock would be to embed a small bar magnet into each edge, like illustrated below. Then they would always stick together, and you could rotate any hex at will and it would still fit into the grid. You can buy very strong small magnets in many sizes and shapes in bulk these days.
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Re: Wesnoth as a board game

Post by Sgt. Groovy »

When thinking it further, I realised that much more important property than rotatibility, which you only need for bridge tiles (and even for them, only for looks, not for game mechanics), is the ability to flip the tiles. That way, you can easily double the selection of terrains available in given number of tiles. You don't usually mix tropical and desert terrain much with snowy one, or cave terrain with outdoor terrain, so flippability would be very useful.

If the magnets would be oriented in the way shown below, then the tiles could be flipped (around the vertical axis in relation to the "up" direction of the tile). They could also still be rotated, but only in 120 degree steps. This would still make all the needed orientations for straight bridge tiles, for bending ones two version would be needed (which could be on opposite sides of the tile).
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