Feudal Foremen

Role:
Designer
Writer

Engine/Tools:
Google Docs.
Paper & Pen

Team Size:
3

You can read the full rulebook here.

“A piece of land, rich with resources, bordered by four kingdoms has come into dispute. The duchies of each bordering land have staked claim upon the area, and no one can agree on to whom it rightfully belong.
As such, the duchies have decided whoever erects a tower to display their might, and rightful domain over the lands first, will be its rightful ruler.
To do this, they have each hired the most renowned of foremen their kingdom could provide.
Unfortunately, they weren’t available, so they got you instead.”

Feudal Foremen is a competitive board game produced during a systems design course.

At the start of the game players set up a somewhat “randomized” field of resources to play on by picking tiles from a shuffled pile. These tiles range from resources to disadvantageous mountains, or neutral plains. As players move around the table picking tiles from the deck they are given a choice to place their tiles on the field moving outwards from the middle. Starting with filing out the entire green area, then moving on to the blue.

Once all tiles have been setup players proceed to pick a set of cards from the base, middle, and top tower cards to produce a tower “blueprint”. This will act as their active goal for the game.
Players will then attempt to steal, intimidate, trade, or use the local bandit to their advantage in order to gather resources. The player that accumulates enough resources and construct each of their three tower floors wins the game.

The game relies solely on the inputs and decisions of the players around the table, and the ability to use both cooperative and competitive abilities ensures players naturally engage each other in a multitude of different ways over the course of a game. Where no one action feels unfairly brought on by external random chances, the game aimed to make each player feel engaged and in control of their own decisions.

Personally contributions include: having worked on the overall design of gameplay and game system. Writing the short backstory and thematic setup of the game, as well as writing the core rulebook to communicate the design and gameplay to players.