The Presentation: Game Pieces

Excluding the game boards and instruction manuals, this game only has 3 types of game pieces because I want to avoid cluttering up the board with anything else.

The first piece type, which is probably the most essential for any board game, are the dice. Thus far, this game will come with 3 dice. Dice in this game is only used to determine who goes first and how much damage an attack or skill inflicts. For example, a weak hero will only use 1 die to determine physical damage where as stronger heroes will use all 3 dice. This will be explained further later on in my blog.

The second piece type are the hero cards. On one side of the card will be the full art of the hero while the other half will hold all information regarding that hero from its health to their trademark quotes. These cards begin with the information facing up and when the player has "finished" using that hero during their turn, they turn the card over. Once all hero cards have been turned face down (thus their art is facing up), then that player's turn is over. Once again, this will be explained further later on in my blog.

The final piece type are the heroes themselves. Each hero is represented by a small figurine of themselves on the board and are moved around by the player who controls them. The positions of each hero on the board is very important. It affects all types of actions a hero can perform in a turn. For example, a melee hero must be next to another hero in order to attack them. In fact, some skills can rely heavily on the positions of the heroes on the game board.

The Presentation: Game Board

The way this game's boards are designed relies on the fact that it is story based. Let me give you all some insight first before we continue...

Essentially, all games have stories attached to them whether they are hard coded stories or stories created by the player(s). Hard coded stories are stories set by the designers for the player to follow. For example, in a First Person Shooter game, the hard coded story could be that you are a soldier sent to infiltrate a base and steal documents. However, players also create their own stories when playing. You will probably hear people saying things like:

"Oh man, I just busted through the main entrance, threw in a grenade killing these group of soldiers before I just made my way into the room killing any enemies I see!"

Or perhaps...

"Dude, I had to snipe the guards first before carefully making my way inside. I didn't want to alert the other guys because I was low on ammunition. Oh yeah, funny thing, I manage to knife a guy in the back during his patrol before entering the room."

Everyone plays games differently and as such, they create their own stories... stories to show their skills or stories to brag to their friends. Anyway, back to this board game...

Because this game is story based, not only does it have multiple game boards, but all of the game's rectangular boards are in the shape of a book. You can see a visual representation of it in my DeviantArt gallery here.

This is one of the main reasons why this game is currently called "Book of Heroes", because it has a lot of story attached to it from the characters' back stories to the boards players battle on. Each board is essentially a unique area in the game's world from a peaceful meadow, around a large lake, the base of a mountain or perhaps even in a bustling city.

The idea is that each time you play a game, you're picking up a "book", opening it up and instead of reading about the battle that took place in that area, the players are instead experiencing it. I want players to be able to say:

"Hey, remember when I surrounded your Hero in Seabreeze Meadow and totally took him out in one turn?"

Or...

"I can't believe you missed your attack three times in Hollow Forest and I won with a Hero that only had 5 health left."

What is Project: Book of Heroes?

Hello everyone.

I've decided to create a blog for this project of mine which actually began as a design on pen and paper back in around 2007. I hope that this blog will spark interest from other people as I have always wanted to get this project published, or at least have a decent prototype created.

So, what is Project: Book of Heroes? Well, it's actually the 3rd board game that I've designed and it is a 2 player game where each player is given a random group of "Heroes" which they use to defeat all Heroes controlled by their opponent by Moving, Attacking and/or performing powerful Skills. Each Hero also has unique names, classes and back stories.

The game play is primarily based on the combat system of Tactical Role Playing Games such as Hoshigami and Final Fantasy Tactics. However, each player cannot choose their Heroes and are instead given random ones, which occur before the game starts. The assigning of random Heroes to each player helps give the game re-playability as nearly no two games will be alike.

Well, that's about it. For the next few posts (which I will be doing so weekly if I remember), I will be posting the rules, some characters, the mechanics as well as the presentation of the game. However, all of these are still in progress and are not written in stone... yet. In fact, this board game has gone through many iterations, however I will be posting the latest ones.