Zombies, Board Games And The Joy Of Rapid Prototyping

In an effort to jettison some of the creative baggage I've been lugging around - and by way of a break from programming - I sat down at the computer last month and fired out a basic boardgame prototype for the perpetually-stalled McGrathi Apocalypse. I put a grid together, a few counters, took some dice and tried it out. Things got out of hand. A few days later I had a full-colour board layout, several different types of marker, character profiles, an action point-based combat and turn system, derived statistics and inventory management rules. It's been a long time since I've been inspired in such a freewheeling fashion.

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Sadly, the resultant 'game' - think Space Hulk meets Left 4 Dead - is no fun at all to play. This is largely due to my shoehorning complex statistics management into it - most of the mechanics were lifted verbatim from the underlying logic of the McGrathi Apocalypse videogame, and bog the flow down accordingly. Each actor on the board has a field of vision, hit points, seven or eight metrics and a number of skills and drawbacks, all of which impact their ability to move, perform actions and engage in combat. One character firing a gun at another takes at least two dice rolls, modified by a number of stats and circumstantial factors. In a test game pitting a single player character against just 3 infected enemies, it took a good 45 mins to resolve the game to completion (the player was overwhelmed and killed in 12 turns). It's nigh-on impossible to keep track of everything. With that in mind, it could maybe work as a computer-assisted boardgame: players would move around and make decisions, with a nearby laptop performing number-crunching duites, resolving combat, tracking statistics and generating random variance. That would actually be quite cool, freeing up the player to focus on tactics and decision-making without worrying about the almost AD&D-level skill checking.

I might develop the boardgame in more detail as a little pet project. For a very quickly knocked-up effort, it already looks pretty damn cool, with nice use of colour, icons and type (I must get some images up later). It could eventually be released to the world as a PDF that could be downloaded, printed and cut for your very own home version. All that said, it's really only a means to test gameplay mechanics, and as such will probably always be a fairly joyless affair for anyone other than d20-worshipping RPG junkies (and even then, it probably isn't anywhere near hardcore enough). The real pleasure, for me at least, lies in the rapid prototyping of a creative idea, from gestation to development to production to testing. If only I could be so progressive with my other projects!

NJM