Tiles or Pre-printed board?

"Pre-printed" map or board is perhaps a more common term. That or "fixed."

There are at least two reasons to use tiles instead of a fixed board:

1. Variation: with tiles, every game is different. This can add interest and can help keep an imbalanced layout (that isn't fully accounted for in testing) from becoming a problem. No building up your armies like crazy in Australia before finally jumping out and taking over the world. At least not every game. Settlers of Catan uses this concept, both with the hex tiles themselves and with the number chits.

2. Gameplay: laying the tiles down, making strategic choices about where to place them and how to orient them can be a lot of fun, and can require some real cleverness. This becomes one of the key parts of the game, then. Lots of games, including Carcassonne (which is almost all about tile-laying), use this.

As for why you might want a fixed board instead, though, each of those has downsides.

1. Variation: it's quite possible that the randomized variation of the board makes the game this play very unbalanced and not fun. If you've every played Settlers where the Wood resource is only created on rolls of, say, 2, 3, or 12 on two dice, you know how awful it can be: the game absolutely requires a lot of the wood resource, and while players can get around it, the game can suffer, especially if those wood are clumped together in one part of the island. In a game like El Grande, being able to say (as the designer) "this territory only has two neighbors, while this one has five" is an important part of the design. Controlling the variation can be done sometimes through rules, but that can get pretty fiddly. Often control is established by simply pre-printing the map.

In addition, there are lots of fun "flavor" elements that you can have with a pre-printed map that don't exist with a randomized layout. Barbarians from the North, seafaring Greeks, what have you. For historically-based games, a fixed board is often essential.

2. Gameplay: If you want the game to be about placing tiles, great! If you want the game to be about something else, though, placing tiles can take a lot of time and brainpower, and may distract from (and complicate) the other parts of the game. A fixed board allows players to focus on other stuff.

-- Matthew

I am working on similar kinda ideas - modular board so that each game can be played on a unique map, giving a difference experience for each game.

I am yet to setup and playtest, but one approach I have taken in making sure the board setup is not 'too' random is to split all the tiles into groups (this particular game has a map made up of hexes similar to Twilight Imperium 3).

So I have 1 central hex tile with three 'rings' of hexes around it. The three rings consist of 36 tiles. So I have split these 36 tiles into groups of six, and then roughly made each group of six tiles have a similar amount of resources, locations etc. When setting up the game, each player randomly picks one of these groups of tiles to set up in their particular slice of the map. That way, the randomness gets cut down somewhat, but each map is still unique...

The other problem in getting the board 'knocked' has also been on my mind, hence my thread in the production forum about trying to either fix tiles down (I have decided against velcro...) or lay them on some sort of surface which will stop them sliding.

With regards to your other note about having a random map or a set map, like Axis and Allies, or War of the Ring, or most other games like these, my main thought is about strategy within the game.

With a fixed map you get two things - One, you get an instantly recognisable 'game world' i.e. Middle Earth, which brings up certain feelings within the players and can be a great atmospheric aspect to the game, if nothing else. Two, you get a map on which every game will be played, and so various strategies relating to that map will arise. Thus, as more and more games are played, players will learn strategies that relate to the map and this has the potential to make the game very cool, or get repetitive.

Part of me likes a set map/board, as it brings up great connotations (i.e. the map board of Dragon Pass) but I also like the idea of creating a different game world for each game. I will still have a strong theme and background to the game, and there are reasons why the map is 'random' (if only that it doens't matter too much what is where...) but my main reason for having a variable map lies within how I see the game being played and what strategies will be incorporated. The gameboard is such an intregal part of the game that it is tied directly into what your game IS.