A month or two ago I mentioned that I’d begun work with my creative team on a new board game called Tiny Conflicts. The premise was to create a casual 4x game that takes place in the margins of a student’s class notebook. The title has evolved to better evoke that aesthetic, and the artwork has executed quite well on the initial vision for the game. Please allow me a few moments to catch you up on how things have been going!

We’ve completed all of the artwork for our first nation, the Mushroom Tribe. They’re a chaotic, militaristic and social nation whose primary playstyle is conquest. Part of the charm of this game is that the little guys are all very innocent looking, but the player behaviors and final board state are in discord with the aesthetic. With that in mind, here are our little guys:

Their favorite activities are marching, sleeping, and murder.

Of course, the game isn’t all about military units. There’s a civilization to build, and that means buildings:

The simple life is best for our mushroom friends.

In order for them to have a place to conquer, I’ve been working on designing a map. The game has a handful of resources to collect – gold, wood, and food are the primaries, with culture, science, and a magic resource called source, as the secondaries. Also, some nations have different methods of obtaining food – farming, hunting, gathering, fishing, and destruction. With those things in mind and the desire to avoid a fully symmetrical map, I’ve started working on layouts that feel well suited for different nation types. Here’s what I ended up with as a first draft:

Blue is water, used by fishing nations. Green is forest, red is mountain, gold is foraging, purple is start zone and the central deep purple is the source pool. This is a 0.75″ grid stretching 2’x2′, and I’m planning an additional 1’x2′ board that can slide on for larger games. The plan looks something like this:

I’m pleased with the progress we’re making on this one. While I haven’t gone into mechanics or game flow at all, what little testing we’ve done without a real map has felt intuitive and engaging. I might go into that aspect of the development in a later devlog. Map design is the primary focus now, with additional nations after. For now though, that’s what I’ve got to show!