The Museum Board Game

I've recently finished the design and prototype of a board game. An HTML version of the rules can be found on the GAMEPORTFOLIO page. All the game needs now is a decent name and many more hours of playtesting.

A game based around a museum is something I've been thinking about since the summer of 2005. Back then I was interested in designing an edutainment computer game that could be summed up as "Museum Tycoon." Instead of a Zoo or Amusement Park or Hospital, it was a Museum that the player, in the role of Curator, would build and manage. The edutainment aspect would come naturally as each exhibit the player put in their museum would have accompanying descriptive text, just like in a real museum. In order to progress and reach the next level of unlockable exhibits, the player would have to lead tour groups through the museum, answering their questions about encountered exhibits correctly. I'm still convinced of its potential for being really fun, informative, and profitable, but it was placed on the back burner so I could focus on more interesting ideas and projects.

In November 2007 I became slightly obsessed with German-style board games, and decided to design one. My first ideas revolved around reversing the typical resource collection and empire expansion mechanics that most board games employ. It would not be about accumulation and expansion, but deprivation and downsizing. I still love the idea, and might return to it for my next game, but at the time I had to drop it in favour of the museum setting.

And it was the museum setting that came first. My way of designing board games is probably not a very common one. The fiction of the game is the first thing I decide upon. The above resource deprivation/downsizing idea was born out of the question "What if Settlers of Catan was about surviving the Black Death?" The Museum Board Game came about because I thought a museum setting would lend itself natually to a variety of board game rules and mechanics. Once I had decided on the setting, everthing else stumbled into place. Like the computer edutainment version, it would be about building and managing your very own museum by efficiently arranging exhibits in order to attract more visitors. The scoring system was somewhat consciously stolen from the card game Set. The different coloured die each corresponding to a different wing of the museum was something that occured to me when playing Settlers of Catan with a red and yellow die, and wondering why the different colours had no ludic purpose. I struggled with the mechanics of exhibit arrangement and placement for a while, before finally noticing the similarities between my museum game board and a gem-swapping game. The exhibits were just like gems, and you swap them with an adjacent exhibit in order to match up perfect combinations.

When you break it down like that, you can say I borrowed and stole a lot of different elements from different games, but I'm nonetheless still proud of my ability to implement them into a cohesive whole. No, I never would have settled on that scoring system if I had never played Set, or the core exhibit swapping mechanic if I wasn't familiar with gem-swapping games, but being a good designer is about making seemingly disparate mechanics work well together, not necessarily creating new ones from scratch all the time.