Is a Complicated Game Board Worth It?

I think warped board is too much effort. It will be awkward to use and a nightmare in production.
I would go with a flat board and use game's mechanisms to convey theme.

I...wholeheartedly agree with a simpler approach.

I hear it all the time from would-be game designers. They want to make a video game (say an MMO) and they are working towards that. That's cool. But if you're a new or first-time designer you need to work your way up.

By creating simpler, smaller games, you learn...so much. You make "mistakes" that would be otherwise fatal if they were in a larger game. In order to learn how to build a house, you need experience building a box...then you work your way up.

I use this example: Remember when you built your first model or drew your first thing? Was it the best thing you've ever made? No, it was the crappiest thing on the planet, but you were proud of it because you accomplished making it in the first place. Subsequent projects became easier, and with more wisdom. Are not games more complicated than building a model?

Why should game design be any different?

see http://www.bgdf.com/sites/default/files/images/hole.jpg

use modified movement rules for each "ring" color section to represent the gradient

something like this seems to be the simplest approach

Cool, intriguing storyline!

What if certain ship engines make a possitive bending of space. Neutralising a bit of the black hole influence on the space time. It could cost energy though, over time. Which you need plenty of if you want to remain safe. A temporary FTL if you will.

With this effect, the black hole might also become a bit unstable, ejecting mass away in the opposite direction. Who knows, who gets hit :) When one player takes a risk closer to the black hole.

I once calculated that if an average human were to become a black hole, he would have a Swartzchild's radius of 10^-23 millimeters and would evaporate within 1/4 of a trillionth (pico-) of a second!

Frank, sounds like you've put a lot of thought into incorporating bizzare physics into the game. Do you have a way to work in the way one part of a ship (closest part) could accelerate towards the event horizon faster than the rest of the ship? Basically the extreme tidal forces in the ergosphere?

The event horizon is defined exactly from the inertial frame of the black hole. An outside observer watching somebody falling in is the one who gets tricked: they see the person approaching the horizon and slowing down asymptotically such that they will never cross the horizon in the lifetime of the observer (or the universe).

The person falling in can indeed cross the even horizon and will not observe any major difference as you mention, at least not if the black hole is supermassive and tidal forces as one approaches and crosses the event horizon are minimal.

What happens when you cross though? What can you see? That gets wierd. Light can come in, so you can conceivably see out. But light cannot get back out, and it isn't because gravity pulls on it. Spacetime is curved, instead, so there are no paths out. This means that when you look "out" of the black hole, you will also be looking back in.

What happens if we can warp spacetime from within this curvature? Nobody knows. Can you reconnect spacetime, or do you influence the curvature locally, confined to the bubble you have already entered? It's probably not a very safe experiment, either way.