~School Board Game Design~ *Need ideas! I'm brand new!*

If I had to guess what kind of game this was just from the materials you have supplied I would say it’s a fantasy based treasure collecting game. It seems you must have some ideas already what you going for but I might do it like this.

There will be several locations on the board that you could treasure hunt (spaced apart) Caves, Ruins, that fire pit. When a player reaches one of them they draw an obstacle card. This card would have things like monsters, a trap or something else that might impede the player. Then there would also be a number of treasure cards that it’s worth. If the player can get by the obstacle they get to draw that number of cards. Among the treasures could be magical items that give the player bonuses like moving faster or seeing what the treasure will be before they have to waste there time or resources.

Getting by the obstacle could be a matter of rolling dice or having built up the right cards.

I hope that gives you enough of an idea.

P.S. Good job with the art

Your type of art would be perfect for vector graphics, using Paint is really not a good idea. Try Adobe Illustrator CS.

Using a professional tool, you'll be able to have several layers (cells if you prefer, like in animation). So you can have the ocean and the land on the bottom layer, add the roads and forest on top of it in another layer. Finally, a new top layer for the grid, so if you want to modify your objects (trees, houses, ground) you can temporarely remove the grid, do you mods and put the grid back on. Also, once you drew an "object" (for example, the inn) you can copy it somewhere else modify it and move it at will without disturbing what's behind it (like the ground, roads, etc...).

Actually, given the content of the game board I am going to recommend "Campaign Cartographer" by ProFantasy software. It has built in features to layout roads, houses, forests, water, etc. It's got a high learning curve, but it's not outrageous expensive.

http://www.profantasy.com

If you want a cheap piece of graphics software I recommend JASC's Paintshop Pro (version 7 is easier to run on a lower end computer).

http://www.jasc.com

Serif Page Pro version 5 is free to download and can probably handle your card layout. I have the newest version of the software and I like it fine.

http://www.serif.com

Serif has lots of free graphics and layout software.

http://www.freeserifsoftware.com/

Lee