I haven't had much time to continue working on my RPG project, but I have gotten a little work done on a small prototype board game. The theme is about water and population management. The play set up is like this: you have four boxes representing the amount of water contained in the river during each season of the year. The blue slips of paper represent water, the green ones crops, and the blank ones people. The cards with the I's represent levels of irrigation.
During each turn, the player roles the dice to determine how many water slips to put in the top box. The player must also decide where to put the people. Putting all the people in one area will allow for faster construction of irrigation, while spreading the people out will allow for gathering water in more places and thus growing more crops sooner. In the picture above, I've placed all my people in the first area and have build one irrigation. Without the irrigation, I would be limited to collecting one water slip per turn, but with irrigation I can receive two slips. It takes two slips of water to be converted into one crop, so this allows for more concentrated crop growth, and in turn higher population growth.
Each turn, all the boxes are moved down to the next row, and the bottom box is emptied and returned to the top to be filled.
I haven't decided if the crops will be consumed by the people yet, nor if the people will die after X turns, nor if the player must have a certain number of crops to feed their people.
There are currently no end game goals, but I imagine reaching a certain population by X turns, or maintaining a certain population for X turns might be good ones.
Similar to my digestion game, this is designed to teach about the importance of water management for the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indus Valley, and Chinese civilizations.
If you use the Machinations tool by Joris Dormans, you can try a rough playable version by opening this file.
Any suggestions or comments?
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