Fog of War
Game, Interaction
Fog of War is a board game created with Tracy Chou and David Yen. Flip tiles as you move across the board, revealing elements that affects your strategy.
Interaction design for the uninitiated
To provide a little context on this project, CMU Design has a freshman game project, where we're asked to create some kind of game out of scratch. This project was our first exposure to interaction design, with discussions like reducing friction to play, satisfying interactions, educating the user, and replayability.
In our initial ideation sessions, we were drawn towards classic abstract strategy games that had simple rules and interactions. When brainstorming over classic war concepts, we came up with an interaction inspired by the concept of "fog of war" — the uncertainty of conditions in which conflict unfolds.
Iterating and playtesting
After we made some initial product decisions and created working prototypes from paper, we
had our first experience with playtesting and user research, which was a big learning experience for us.
Our initial testing was full of fumbling around and getting people's general opinions. While it felt collaborative and was helpful to hear people's ideas, we soon learned that it was more effective to test for specific, measurable responses to different variables. We found that people were more satisfied by shorter, faster games on a smaller board, within a threshold. Playtesting also helped us discover flaws in our rules and the most strategically satisfying "terrain" elements to hide under the game's tiles.
The final game
We made liberal use of school's laser cutter to make a physical board and box out of wood. The pieces are frosted marbles, each side has a king which is opaque. When the game begins, players shuffle and place the tiles smoked-side up on the board, providing an element of chance to every game. Tiles fit perfectly into shallow recesses engraved in the board's surface, making an audible click clack as the game unfolds.
The King piece moves one square at a time in any direction, confined within a 3 by 3 square, called the King's Court. Normal pieces move diagonally across the board any distance. The player flips over the tile his piece lands on, revealing one of four elements or a blank tile (land).
A rabbit forces a double jump.
A snake kills the piece instantly.
A mountain blocks the piece from moving.
A river reveals a surrounding tile.
The elements persist throughout the game, affecting each player's strategy. Enemy pieces are captured by sandwiching them between two of your pieces across any distance on the board, allowing for surprising and even multiple captures.