Design & Inspiration: The Board

If I'm making a board game, I'll need a board!

The idea of North is that you're exploring and fighting your way north, and that the farther north you go the more dangerous the environment, so the game mechanics should reflect that. Players start at the bottom of the board (south) and move towards the top (north). That's simple enough. The board is divided into three zones - green, blue, and black - which represent different environment types, getting progressively more dangerous. Green is forest, blue is a frozen-over river, and black is the rocky frozen waste.

I want to work some randomness into game setup, because I like games that play differently each time. Specifically I'm talking about games like Dominion, Settlers of Catan, and Zombies!!!. Of these three, Dominion is the outlier and I'm not really looking to that one as much - it's more of an example than an inspiration, since North is a board game, not a card game. In Catan the board is randomized at setup, while in Zombies the board is added to randomly as you play.

I'm going with more of a Settlers approach here: the board is made up of many hexagonal tiles. But a pure random distribution makes it harder to structure the game to be more difficult the further you travel north. Instead, there are three types of tile that are randomly distributed within their respective zones - there's a set of green zone tiles, a set of blue zone tiles, and a set of black zone tiles. This way the difficulty always increases as you go north, but the board is still different each session.

Quick mockup of the board:
hex tiles divided into 3 zones

I do have a couple of reasons for choosing hex tiles, which is not just "it was good in Catan". One of the reasons is that it keeps distance consistent. Moving diagonally on a square grid moves you a larger objective distance than moving up or down. On hex tiles you move the same distance no matter which direction you travel. This  has no actual effect on the game, it just makes me feel a little better. The second reason for choosing hex tiles is to facilitate enemy movement. I'll talk more about enemies in a later post, but to keep it simple, hex tiles let me use a standard six-sided die to randomly determine enemy movement - a hexagon has six sides, so you can just roll a die, say north is 1, and move the enemy in the designated direction. No need for fancy dice or spinning dials or anything.

Now, back to the zones. As I said above, the southernmost is the forested green zone. This is the safest part of the map: there are other humans here, and it isn't as cold as it is farther north. There are some bandits, but few monsters. In the green zone you'll find houses, settlements, and camps nestled among the trees and the clearings. 

The blue zone represents a frozen-over river. It's colder here, and more dangerous - it's possible to fall through the ice, and monsters are more common. The islands may hold shelter in the form of cottages or houses, and the icelocked cargo ship and the lonely island castle are good places to search for supplies. There's a bridge crossing the river with fewer environmental hazards, but more possibility for bandit attacks. I haven't totally settled on how the bridge will be represented with the tile system I have in mind.

The black zone is the frozen waste of the north, the home of the monsters. It's frigid and there are many natural hazards among the glaciers, mountains, and the tundra. The ranger tower is the only (relatively) safe spot in this zone, and still holds supplies. The monsters make their lairs in an old mine, a canyon, and an abandoned military base. Finding the lairs will be the game's objective, but I'll talk about that later.

Hopefully this gives you a good overview of what the board will look like. Check in for writeups on gameplay mechanics!