This is my first post so hi to everyone!
I'm currently working on a high scope fantasy empire building game, and I'm looking for a simple way on how to mark the ownership of a territory, without having to add too many tokens/chits for this reason. Any suggestions?
Territory ownership marking
Fri, 09/09/2011 - 08:43
Fri, 09/09/2011 - 10:28
#1
First of all, welcome to bgdf
First of all, welcome to bgdf :)
Perhaps you could use pandemic / monoply style cards - where one card represents a single province?
So a deck of province cards (each representing an area) and whoever is in possession of the geographical card therefore has rights to it.
This is good becase you can obviously write all of the information and/or flavor text. But is not a perfect solution because it doesn't easily and actively show the boundries of every area that every player owns. eg. they would have to look around at every players cards on the tableaux before deciding if somewhere was or wasnt owned by someone.
Fri, 09/09/2011 - 18:29
#3
Risk
You could do it similarly to risk where 1 army (or anything that a player owns) must be on a territory, thus showing ownership while contributing to the game itself.
Thu, 09/15/2011 - 18:20
#4
Omitting chits in the inner part of a territory
With many countries probably most of them lie in the inner of an territory, i.e., they don't border on another player's country. Using this you could save quite some chits.
I'm using something similar with armies: A player controls a field if they have an army on it or if the field is empty and the player is the only player having an army in an adjacent field. This way some fields may be neutral, which may or may not suit your game.
Sat, 09/17/2011 - 19:59
#5
If the territories were
If the territories were listed in a track on the edge of the board, you could simply mark ownership with flags/chits around the edge of the board to leave your actual map space for troops or whatever else you'd be using. This, of course would present some of the same trouble as using cards, but at least the information would be centrally located and also keep them always in the same location, instead of having to hunt down the card for each territory...
If you have groups of smaller city-states which combine to represent control of a larger territory or country, you could have a designated space where a chit/flag could be placed to represent control of the whole, thereby eliminating the need for many of the tokens in play at any given time...
Wed, 11/09/2011 - 21:42
#6
Crazy idea
So this idea only works in a very specific circumstance, but perhaps this is it. If the spaces on your board are regular and uncomplicated (hex, grid, maybe triangles) you might consider this:
If you placed a pin, or something like a pin, at each vertex where your territories meet, you could use a colored piece of string wrapped around the border to represent owned land. This border wouldn't go around the edge of each individual plot, but around your entire border, assuming this is a game where territory acts like a large blob, not a series of disconnected zones. There would be obvious difficulties in a territory increasing too much in size, but you could also have a small spool that your string comes off of that sits on one of your posts, and you could unwrap a limited amount of string from there. Another problem could be the pins themselves, especially in a play-testing phase, but a solid board with some low, sturdy pins would probably hold up, assuming players aren't yanking on the strings all the time. A third issue is players sharing borders and crossing their strings, getting them tangled.
Despite the fact that I just listed issues for a paragraph, I think this little trick could work if your board and patience would allow. Maybe not. Just a crazy idea.
Thu, 11/10/2011 - 19:36
#7
Border tokens
For games with pretty sizable and unique board spaces (e.g. Risk), I think tokens are probably the best method, especially if the tokens have a purpose other than just marking ownership. However, if a board has a ton of smaller spaces, which I assume is your problem, having to drop a token down on every spot is super annoying and clutters the board. I like the border idea; just drop a marker on the border regions of a players territory. I also think having tokens mark ownership of it's region and all adjacent, otherwise uncontested, spaces is a simple way of cluttering the board.
Another idea, taking off from the border idea, is to have a set of generic markers that players place, not on spaces, but on the borders of spaces. These markers would, in effect, rope around players territory, and would simply be adjusted inward or outward as players territories expand and shrink. This 1. cuts down on the needed number of tokens, 2. avoids covering up info on the spaces (if you've ever played Diplomacy you know how annoying it is when tokens cover the names of spaces), and 3. might actually look kind of cool, especially if they were cool looking tokens. Just an idea.
Yes, I've also thought about that solution, but it would be tedious for the players to always have to check the cards to see what territory belongs to which player, and make strategic planning almost impossible.
I need some way with which you can easily see the boundaries of an empire just by looking at the board. If no better idea comes up though, I guess I'll make flag chits for each colour to be placed at captured areas.