There’s only a couple of more hours left until midnight. So here’s a summary of what I’ve been doing today:

Started the day by getting the theme wrong on twitter, doing dishes, preparing dinner for later (see below) and going to the gym. After all of this was done I was ready to tackle the theme!

Space-themed board game of deliciousness

I knew I wanted to make something with war, space and mining resources on planets. My first thought was something like Monopoly but later steered more towards Settlers and then Risk. I started prototyping it with my 8×8 Reversi board, dice to represent planets and Reversi pieces to represent the players’ units.

Basically, you control units that you can use to attack other players or defend your planets. Claiming two planets or more with your units meant that you could produce more units each round. When a player loose all of their units they’re out of the game.

First prototype

This game was a bit too simplistic and didn’t really convey any theme so I decided to add cards to the mix. I used ordinary playing cards to prototype, writing down what each of them represented. (I plan on creating cards with graphics later.)

The production of new units by capturing planets turned into a Production card which added an additional unit to play. Then I added the rule that said that after each round you get to pick up one card for each planet you occupy. This meant that you would still produce new units after each round and gave incentive for players to occupy planets. This also meant that I could add a lot of new fun cards.

Now with cards!

With the new cards I managed to sneak in another reference to the theme: the Tiny world card that actually destroys the outer most edges of the board which means that the grid that the game is played on gets smaller.

Notes from brainstorming

Now I just have to write down all the rules. Also the attacking isn’t really sorted out yet. But that’s next!

If you find the game interesting it’d be great if you could leave comments on the official rules document where anything is unclear or if something could be improved, or to just spam.

* Goes back to writing rules *

I finished Five-O on October 21st and submitted it to the App Store for approval that night. As the days went by, I started to get worried that it wouldn’t be approved in time, but on Friday, October 29th, I received confirmation that the game was approved for sale. I got my first sales on October 30th! Woohoo!

View Five-O in the App Store

Five-O is a board game I’ve been developing in my spare time over the last few years. It started as a side project during college. I was taking a course in artificial intelligence, and I wanted to create a game with an AI component. Growing up, I had played one of the many “Scrabble-but-with-numbers” games and had fond memories of it. Searching the internet revealed not a single good implementation of this idea for the computer, so that’s what I set out to make.

The basic rules are as follows. Players take turns placing intersecting sequences of numbers on a board. Each sequence must total to five or a multiple of five, and no sequences may be more than five tiles in length. For example, 7-3-8-7 would be a valid sequence because it adds up to 25. The sequence 3-9-5 is not valid because it adds up to 17 which is not a multiple of five. You can read more on the game’s webpage.

With the release of the iPad, I put the desktop version of Five-O on hold and started focusing on getting an iPad version done. The device is just too perfect for board games like Five-O. The October Challenge was the push I needed to finally finish version 1.0 and publish it in the App Store.