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Pathways game

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franks:
It’s been a while my friends! I like what you’ve done to the place!

In a previous post Dan graciously offered me to share a project I’ve been working on and a little bit of what I’ve been up to. I hope this post is appropriate. 

A good part of that time has been publishing and designing my first game called Pathways.



Covid has been brutal on the lives of many people and it has certainly shaken us up in one way or another. Sometimes challenges can also present opportunities and that is what happened in 2020.

As it happened I had most of 2020 off work since we were asked to clear out our holiday bank. Great, lots of time off and nowhere to go! I guess I’ll make the best of it!

With that free time I started walking 5 - 8 kms a day (3 – 5 miles). It was on these walks I put my mind to the idea of design. It’s always been in the back of my mind but never took it to seriously.

If I were to entertain the idea I wanted to start with something that wasn’t too complex and for me I narrowed that down to dexterity games or abstract games. Of course it isn’t as easy as that.

I have several games in both genres and I focused on what I liked (or didn’t like) with these style of games. With dexterity I prefer stripped down games like Crokinole and Carrom over larger thematic games like Flick ‘em up: Dead of Winter. Great game but I like the simple head to head challenge of a quick set up and play.

I like but don’t love abstracts. I’ve played a lot and what I don’t like are the one that end in dead-locks where who ultimately loses is the player who makes the first mistake. Of course this is just a personal preference and not all abstracts are like that and it isn’t to say those are bad games.

As I pondered all this, I had a wacky idea, could you mix the two genres, dexterity and abstract? It seemed pretty ridiculous. The two have very little in common other than both generally being theme-less and stripped down game design.

So I tried to take it quite literally; what if one were to flick a disk across a chessboard?  But, what would be the point of that? Without any resistance other than that from other disks there didn’t seem to be much of a point.

Looking at dexterity game design what I realized, there are usually some sort of impediments in play for both players. Think of the posts in Crokinole or the magnet balls in Klask, (a game I highly recommend by the way).

Back to flicking across the chessboard; how could I introduce an impediment as described? Add posts to the board? Somehow create divots in the board? It wasn’t making much sense until I focused on the idea of divots. Which brought me to; what if the chessboard pattern on the board were holes and as disks fell into the holes they would create new flat surfaces that would make follow up shots easier?

There it was; create a board with holes in a chessboard manner with the goal of getting from one side of the board onto the other. I was excited to see if I could fashion such a thing. I went home, made a template on graph paper and manually drilled 49 holes into a piece of board I found around the house. I dug out some Crokinole disks and set to try it out.

There is much more to the story than that but if you at all remember me when I was previously active here, I can be long winded so I won't go into the gory details of game development, just to say it was quite a journey!

Well here we are, almost two years later and the project is about to launch on Kickstarter, (March 15th). I am using that platform as intended; without funding this project likely won’t happen, even though I put a lot into development.

Special thanks to Dan and the other admins at CarcC for the opportunity to let you know what I have up to!

If this at all seems interesting, check out the links and hopefully I’ll be able to one day challenge you to a game of Pathways.

All the best, franks

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pathways-game/pathways-dexterity-game

https://www.pathwaysgame.com

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/351300/pathways

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCraPPH1uiqoCjf1SI6rul1w/videos

https://www.facebook.com/groups/pathwaysgamesystem




Linkback: https://www.carcassonnecentral.com/community/index.php?topic=5822.0

Meepledrone:
Congrats! It seems you had a great time creating the game and the result looks fantastic! It perspires so much love and attention to detail.

+1 merit for the initiative.

Thanks for sharing and best of lucks for the campaign!!!

franks:
Thank you Meepledrone!!!

It has been a journey!!

Decar:
Only just logged in for the first time in a couple of days and saw this!

Great to see you back on the forum and with excellent news too!

I'm really looking forward to seeing more about Pathways. Do you have details about a review copy hitting the UK soon? I'd be keen to hunt that down!

franks:
Thanks Tom!

Once again, I appreciate the forum space to speak about the game!

The game is on it's 2nd stop and I have a few other destinations planned but Tom please send me a PM with your address and I'll see you get to spend a bit of time with the game along the way. It will likely have to move onto a other locations but I'm more than happy for you to take a look  :)

All the best,

franks

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