Before I begin, let me apologise for this post in advance. It might seem a bit long winded and there are plenty of photographs. I have only given brief outlines of each development and have not gone into specific rules, although I have posted a rules document. I am also using the regular
Carcassonne term ‘follower’ for a players playing pieces. Hopefully, you will read through and let me know your thoughts, ideas, etc.
I have not been posting very much here recently due to being preoccupied elsewhere. As some of you may know from reading The Catacombs thread, I have been working on a spin-off version of
Carcassonne, or rather,
had been working on a spin-off version of
Carcassonne. I say ‘had’ because it has moved away from being a spin-off. This has kept me busy and the users here are long overdue an update.
I had an idea for a tile-laying game based on colour matching.
The very first version was given the working title,
Colour Maze. The idea was that a player could lay a tile (
Carcassonne style) each turn and then either deploy a follower to the newly laid tile or move an already placed follower through the maze on each subsequent turn by leaving the tile through a door of the players colour onto the next tile, and so on. I produced a working copy of this game (albeit on very small tiles) for playtesting purposes. The trouble was, although I liked the idea of using colours in this way, there was no real goal and it was difficult to lay tiles in such a way that the colours always matched up, enabling a player’s follower to move freely from tile to tile.
Here is a picture of the original Colour Maze. This picture shows the idea that both colours should match to enable access for the follower to move to another tile.The idea about the colour matching part was dropped in favour of allowing followers to simply move through a exit of their own colour (red can pass through a red exit) onto the next tile. The effect here is that of one-way exits. A player might leave the tile he is on (through the door of his own colour) and not be able to return (because the door on the other side would be of a different colour). This made it easier to lay tiles and move a follower around, but there was still no real goal.
Shortly after, the Catacombs idea was suggested here at CC by Jabberwocky, and expounded slightly by Whaleyland. It was this idea that ‘switched the light on’ and gave
Colour Maze a theme. For the first-time I visualised it as a side game to
Carcassonne. However, some mechanics would have to be changed. It was renamed
The Catacombs. The movement of the player’s followers was dropped. Instead of moving a follower around, each tile would score 4 points to a follower placed there. A player was able to play as many followers as he wished into the Catacombs. Followers were to be scored at game end and followers could not be returned once placed in the Catacombs. For every tile that the follower could trace a route through to at game end, he would score an additional 4 points. A player was allowed to move his follower once (the mechanism used was a follower was placed in the Catacombs upright and, once moved, was laid down, as farmers are. Followers that were lying in the Catacombs could not subsequently be moved again).
Here are my original tiles that I drafted for The Catacombs. After this, I quickly posted a mock-up tile in The Catacombs thread.It was not quite the idea that Whaleyland had in mind, but that did not matter as my simple post changed the course of the game entirely. I renamed the expansion
The Crypt so I would not confuse it with
The Catacombs but that was a short lived title. A comment by Novelty regarding my example tile looking like a dungeon chamber made me rethink what I had presented. I thought that it would be great to do a spin-off which was set in dungeons… and so
Beneath Carcassonne Castle was born.
I produced blank tiles in the different configurations to work with and set about re-developing my game.
The original Beneath Carcassonne Castle tiles. The first thing to be done was to obtain some coloured stickers and make a basic tile set. The first tile set contained 53 tiles. After playing around with this for a short time, it dawned on me that tracing a route through the dungeons was incredibly difficult to do. A mechanism was needed to enable players to gain access to other dungeon chambers. The only way I could think of was for each player to be allowed to take an ‘unblocking marker’ in their colour and place it over an exit of an incorrect colour. For each ‘unblocking marker’ used it would score minus points for them. However, this was not ideal at all and so it was ‘back to the drawing board’.
Here are those original tiles. Although the picture shows them mainly colour matching, this idea had already been dropped. In the picture above you can see that the yellow follower may freely pass through the exit south but once passed would not be able to return (as the exit north would then be green).The idea of using an ‘unblocking marker’, once again, changed the course of the game. What would happen if you could freely pass through exits in your own colour, but had to pay some sort of price to move through an opposing colour door? With that question, I developed a payment mechanism. Using the ‘unblocking markers’, which were simply wooden discs in the four colours obtained from other games, a player could pass through an exit, of an opposing colour, by paying the disc in the appropriate colour of the exit. On entry to the chamber the player could pick up the colour disc on the other side of the exit. As a poor example of this, in the above picture, yellow could travel north through the exit by paying a green disc (a green exit). On entry to the next chamber he would collect a yellow disc (the colour on the other side of the exit). I also added discs of white and black which could be used to unblock and to block passages respectively. Now that the movement had been developed it was time to add a goal.
The idea of prisoners locked inside a dungeon was what I was thinking of and having the goal to escape from the dungeon was logical. What was needed was an escape point. I developed some simple starting board ideas.
Here are the first boards used. The central one is the one used for playtesting. The ‘Guard Doors’ with the skulls were locked doors which required paying 3 different discs (one of which had to be in the player’s colour).The playtest went ok, but the game was over too quick. I found myself calling the discs lock picks. This seemed a sensible reason for paying the colour disc fee; using a lock pick to obtain access to the next chamber. What was needed was another method of escape. I used the idea that there could be two ‘runners’ to collect lock-picks and a large follower who was the one that needed to escape. Another board was developed… and that was not the only thing that changed…
This was the next starting board to be settled upon.A total revamp was necessary to solve some initial problems of the game. Bouncing some ideas off my brother in law was the next step. The next version not only introduced the new board, but also introduced 9 different lock pick colours, a gold key, locked cells and guards. The idea here was that 8 different coloured lock picks were needed, which could be exchanged for a silver lock pick. Three different coloured lock picks could be used to unlock the cell door and set the prisoner free. A silver lock pick could be used to pick the lock of the ‘Key Room’ enabling a player to collect a Golden Key. The Golden Key is used to unlock the Guardhouse door, so that the prisoner can escape! The guards were added as a hindering mechanism. Runners or Prisoners are not able to share a space with a Guard. Guards can move freely through the dungeons and do not require lock picks.
It was the next change that swung the game completely away from being a
Carcassonne spin-off into a game in its own right. The change was from square tiles to hexagons. The reason for this change was to create extra route options and to solve a tile placing problem on the starting gameboard. The starting board was redesigned and tiles, of course, were changed. The game was also renamed
Dungeons, because it had moved away from being a spin-off.
The new starting board
Playtesting in action.I was much happier using the hex tiles and the game played really well, but it was not without its problems, which were noted and ironed out in subsequent rule modifications.
The components for the game arrived from Germany shortly after this.
I know you want to ask after the rabbits… read on 
For those interested, here are the rules, prior to the hex tile introduction:
www.john-warren.co.uk/carcassonne/files/dungeons/Dungeons.pdfThe more I thought about it, the more I liked the theme of gemstones, and so another idea was to re-theme the game as a gemstone collecting game. This was given the name
Mountain Miner, and uses the same collecting and dropping principle for collecting coloured gemstones. There is no starting board in this game, just a starting tile. The object being that you must collect different coloured gemstones and leave the mine by returning to the starting tile. The last development was ‘mission cards’. These would be distributed two cards to each player, kept secret and upon leaving the mountain, one must be played and mission completed to win. This is a project I am currently working on.
Finally, I said I would get to the rabbits! My last game is called
Rabbit’s Warren (I like the name anyway
). I noticed that when I was playing with the square tiles , they would form round chambers and square earth patches. This game is being developed out of a desire to do something with those unused squares!
This is the difficult one and is still in very early stages and I’ll only be very, very brief. When a rabbit enters a ‘burrow chamber’ he might be able to ‘plant’ a dandelion, lettuce or carrot in the field ‘squares’, depending on if they are pictured on the tile. He can leave the warren by means of the red arrow, harvest the field and return to the warren by re-entering at the blue arrow. However, a wolf patrols the fields. Dandelions are worth 3 points each, carrots are worth 2 points each and lettuce is worth 1 point each. The second set of tiles have bridges across burrows making access to the fields much easier… but this game needs lots of work to make it work!
The biggest problem for the games is the 10% of colour blind people out there. I’m not sure how to overcome this difficulty, although with
Mountain Miner each gemstone begins with a different letter, and so this could be incorporated into the graphics. If you made it this far, thanks for reading.
BTW, the finalised graphics will be full colour. I have just used black and white printing to save ink in the prototypes
I am also seeking a supplier of cardboard hexagons to create the hexagon tiles.
