Player generated map?

I like the idea of the dungion or map unfolding as you go along. It creates an interesting blind factor that you can't see what is in front of you. It can be unlimited potentials.

I don't like the idea of making rules up as your go, if I am reading your post correctly. I guess the extreme example of this is D&D and other RPG style games that you play out of a book. I always hated these games with a passion because their was nothing there for me to look at or play with. Plus, whenever I sat down to try it out with my friends who had played it for years, I felt oberwelmed with the amount of information I had to learn that I didn't have anywhere for my brain to go. There was just to much to take in that I couldn't enjoy it at all. I like structure. If I have to make up the whole game as I go, where is the game?

scenarios yes! That could be vary cool. This is something I am contemplating for my game because it would allow richness I think. Also, what aspects of fun adventure video games can one get away with in a board game format?

In the first stages of this adventure labyrinth game I am working on, I had so much that I had to cut out of the game. It was way too complex. I had the Labyrinth board, then I had the overworld. It was going to be a 1000-course-meal. But there was this idea I had in the overworld where you meet different characters who had their own house on this map. And these character would send you out on missions or you could earn money by doing them a favor. Some of the characters would even send you out on this sort of "chain-sequence of events" inspired by Legend of Zelda. And the missions could be archived in a booklet or something to organize this complexity.

I wanted to mention a mechanic though that I had this idea for that would maybe allow the character locations on the map to be sort of random as to make each game experience different. So all 20-50 characters don't always live in the same house. I thought about little monopoly houses scattered all around the board that represented the inhabitence of this world. As you walk around on pathways around this board, you come up to some house that is unmarked. It looks like every other house. If you want to enter this house, you draw a character card, to find out who lives there. This character has some role in the game. You then get to mark the house by some method that identifies it now that that character lives there. And so on like this to discover the rest of the inhabitence of the world as the game progresses. It sounds complex I know. I thought I would share that though. I scraped this idea for the moment. Maybe I will think about it in another game.

@Kneuronak i think you should look into the game Carcassonne, because your game sounds the most like it, players take turns building a map and can opt to put a figures on the board to claim a certain area (road, city, field, etc). What i thinking you can do is follow the idea of dynamic board making and add a movement/combat/item element to it.

@The Magician about your comment on old school Pen and Paper games such as D&D, i understand your point, games now a days require so much visual aid and user input for more visual output, i am guess that is how you feel about it. Pen and Paper games are at best drawn with your imagination, the game is more free form as you can do whatever and say whatever, its really in a different league as boardgames go. I used to play them, and they were enjoyable, i guess its just not for everyone.

Hoywolf- I just bought Carcassonne today. It's a cute little package and looks like fun. Can't wait to try it out.

I've only seen two that work, and even then they don't work perfectly.

Stealth Chess and War of the Ring use a counter that is incremented up one for each move the hidden piece moves. When the player moving it wants to do something with it, they make all of those moves at once. This works great until the opponent tries to interact the piece in question. In both of these games, that doesn't matter. It does matter if there is any area-of-effect involved. If somebody disappears, the logical thing to do is to fireball them that very second. You don't know where they are, but a twenty foot explosion ought to catch them. They can't have gone that far already. (I ripped this mechanic off for a tactical strategy game. You lot will be seeing a print-and-play release in a few months. I fixed this by declaring that anything shot at the player's last known position forces the player to move part of their stealth (moving their last known position out of the range) or take the damage.)

There is also a chess variant (I don't remember what it's called) where each player sits in front of their own board, take turns moving, and a referee transfers moves over when they capture pieces or get close to them. This is ridiculously impractical. It requires a player who can't play, and you can't in good conscience do that.

@The Magician, good point, i did play D&D, but i liked playing the world of darkness games better, plus that game in itself is a social game, you need good player as well as a good GM (DM), or else the experience can suck. It sounds like you played with a more hardcore number cruncher players, rather than more imaginative players. I played a more story-base type game with very little rolling involved, that is probably why i enjoy it, if i wanted a heavy number crunching game, then i would opt for a video game and let the computer do the massive rolling.

This is great feed back guys!
Now as I said I haven't played much to know what's out there. Carcassone is the only tile laying game I have played. I like it for some reason. I think it's the scoring mechanism that makes it fun for me. Yes, the player is generating the board as the game progresses, but someting about it doesn't quite float my ship. You don't move on the board. Your really only placeing things that remain static. The game is actually quite abstract. It's good in it's own right. It's not an adventure game for sure. But, the board doesn't feel like a board to me because your not moving anything on it. I also realize that their is no way for me to have fun playing it solo for the purposes of crasping it's game design lessons. It's not easy for me to look at a game and have someone on hand to enjoy it with. However, I just met this man who owns a little
book store in town, he doesn't stock game books. However, he just happens to be an espiring game designer and have a friend who has just published his own board game. We are quickly becoming friends and he sais that because we will have a little game designers circle formed, he is willing to now stalk game design books in his store. This seems to be a fortunate and vary conveniant circumstance.

So in my labyrinth game, I am thinking about haveing one side of the board be tile play generated based, and the other side be static labyrinth, with variable elements. This way I think, the different game phases feel different. So, the tile laying side that will be a forest labyrinth. I was thinking about the original Zelda for NES. Remember the simble sprite graphic system it had. The terrain feartures were vary simple. It seems vary easy for me to imagine those terrain graphics as terrain tiles in a board game. I'm trying to figure out how the player would lay them out as they go so it feels like they are discovering the map as they explore, and move along the tiles. And what mechanic would make for laying tiles and moving along them.

Ok. There is the obvious way to do mazes. You draw a ton of little mazes, and you stitch them together. This is not a good idea in the first logical rendition. (I've been here, so I know.) You think you'll draw a bunch of 5 by 5 mazes, and then you'll put them together. The thing is, you need a way to connect them. That's where problems start happening. You see, when you put the tiles together, they need to match up. You can say that you play tiles however they will fit, but then they don't fit in the grid. You can make tile exits uniform (open in the center of each tile, for instance) which makes your maze feel very same-y after a little while, or you can leave the edges open in arbitrary places, and count something with a wall on either (or on both, depending on how much freedom you want to give) tiles as a wall between them, and anything without these walls as passable. This works pretty well if you design your tiles right, but you get "white space." Most stylish mazes don't have any "white space" or "rooms," or any place where you have a two by two block of cells with no walls between any of them. If you can live with whitespace, the third method isn't a bad call. The first is functional, certainly, but not very classy. The second works great in Wiz War (it's a very fun game, albeit one in need of some balance) because the board is so small, and the creation of choke points is an interesting element. If your game is bigger than that, and you mean it to be a maze, rather than a dungeon full of rooms, the second gets nasty quickly.

However, this is not necessarily the right way to do it. A better way to do mazes with tiles like this is to make each tile a single cell. It can have preset cells in the grid to force openness, or not. (There's a kids game (one of the better ones) like this: The A-Maze-ing Labyrinth. It has preset cells.) This is a ton of tiles, though, and it doesn't create a very complex maze.

The last thought I have for you is the concept of a knotwork maze. Basically, rather than thinking about walls, you think about paths. A one-by-one path-based cell has a few ways it can go. Without dead ends, it can be two right-angles, a four-way cross, or two straight paths, crossing over and under each other. With dead ends, it has left-hand and right-hand bends with two dead ends, a straight with two dead ends, a t-joint with one, and a four-way dead end. This isn't great in and of itself. However, it gets interesting when you make your knot tiles bigger. If, on a five-by-five tile, each of the twenty edge segments can be arbitrarily connected (or not) to any number of other edge segments, you can have ludicrously complex mazes. You quickly run into a problem. These are technically 3d tiles. Two pieces can occupy the same space on the tile without occupying the same space in-game (the center of an over-under straight in the small knot version, for instance.) Making tiles 3d is pretty much not an option, particularly once one realizes that in the five-knot version a knot can stack many levels high on a regular basis. The answer to this is to put a half-circle on each edge segment (they will form full circles when two tiles touch.) Rather than defining a move in terms of a grid on the tile, define one "space" as a move between one circle and any other connected to it.

I love this idea, but it won't work for your theme. It is a very abstract mechanic. A maze in a forest is pretty much 2D. You don't do a lot of moving inbetween layers in a forest. You don't make arbitrary jumps in a forest. (You don't have walls in an actual forest either, but that is called Creative License, while a knot-type forest maze is called Nonsense.) You'd want to go with one of the first two. Also, check out Labyrinth. It's a pretty good shifting maze mechanic, not sure if that's what you want, but it's a fairly fun game for something so simple. (One of these days, I'm going to rip it off for an abstract strategy game...)

Algorithmic generation is another possibility, but it is time-consuming, slow, and probably doesn't give you your exploration element. Here's the link anyway: Maze Generation on Wikipedia

Also, I'd like to link you to Daedalus, an old program that takes maze geekery to a whole new level.

I agree with brisingre, 5x5 maze tiles connecting through doors on the middle of the sides risk producing a monotonous maze. But I think for most games they can work. Some time ago, on the old-old BGDF site, there was a similar thread to this. I don't want to spend time looking for it on the archive, but I can post here some sample images I posted there back then.

Four basic 5x5 tiles:

Some of the possible resulting mazes (without rotation of the tiles):

And some more, this time rotating the tiles:

If 5x5 tiles result in monotony, you can use 6x6, 7x7, etc. As long as the doors on each side match, it will work.
I recommend using even values only for 8x8 and up tiles with two doors per side:

For 6x6, perhaps an acceptable solution (given that two doors per side will result in too easy a maze) would be to have just one off-center door and place the tiles so that doors match, forming a small empty space surrounded by tiles:

Keep in mind that to avoid unaccesible spaces, you need all doors in a tile to connect.

Wow these are great ideas! I love the one about haveing maze printed on both sides. I would love to compose this monster so that game play could just keep going and going,or the fire keeps burning, going back and forth between boards laying new features over the board. If the player choses to play the game that way. I'm not quite ready to design the tiles, but when I do, I have a look in mind of pathways in the forest where you see some trees. Forests aren't mazes after all. For the forest I'm not going for the look of walls forming a maze, but pathways that one could get lost in because they will change.

The interior contents of the tiles doesn't matter. Each tile has 4 exits. Each exit can be a dead end, or connected to one, two or three other exits on the same tile. This gives 6 possible different tile types., 7 if non-intersecting cross-overs are possible.

The two tile arrangement patterns displayed above are effectively identical as far as maze generation is concerned. They may look different but in practice they're the same. Each tile has 4 edges. Each edge is either directly connected to either another tile or to an external edge of the map. Each of those tiles is one of the above 6 or 7 types, possibly modulo a rotation.

Moving to two exits per side doesn't make things a lot more interesting unless you also allow non-intersecting cross-overs. With forced intersections the number of possible permutations with 8 exits is not interestingly larger than with merely 4. (Exact count left as an exercise for the reader) With non-intersecting cross-overs however the number of possible tile permutations becomes noticably larger. Additionally with two exits per side the offset grid arrangement becomes significant as a given edge of a tile may have one exit to another tile and another exit off the board.