10x10x10

After being put into the branding group our first brief was 10x10x10, it was a one day project, just to get our brain juices flowing again. My initial reaction was it's 10 cubed, so I need to do something where it gets multiplied by 10 each time, eg draw 10 things, draw each of those 10 things 10 times, then draw 10 drawings from each of those drawings, so that I ended up with a 1000 drawings, or model cubes inside each other or something else equally unfeasible and dull within a day.

There was a small clause within the brief though that caught my imagination: "a complicated game" - with all the thoughts of cubes in my mind I decided to invent a game, a simple game that had 3 different sets of 10 elements that could be combined in a variety of ways, and it might not allow for 1000 combinations but a fair few. And to satisfy my cube inclination I made a dice.

The game had 10 different battlefields, 10 different monsters, and each character had 10 hit points. The battlefields were Grass, Jungle, City, River, Ocean, Mountain, Sky, Desert, Arctic and Cave. I then came up with 5 adjectives that could describe each battlefield: Plains/outdoor, Water, Air, Dense terrain and Grassy and assigned these 5 different types to each sort of terrain. Grass was grassy (obviously) and Air, Jungle was grassy, City was dense terrain, River was grassy and water, Ocean was water, Mountain was plains/outdoor and air, Sky was air, Desert was plains/outdoor, Arctic was water and plains/outdoor and Cave was dense terrain.

I came up with 10 monsters that would satisfy the 5 different sorts terrain I came up with, these were: Stone Golem, Human Warrior, Fire Ghost, Laser Shark, Milipede, Dragon, Squid Alien, Well 'Ard Goat, Giant Spider and Ultra Eagle. Stone Golem was someone that would be good in plains/outdoor, Human warrior in dense terrain, Fire Ghost in grassy, Laser Shark in water, Milipede in grassy, Dragon in sky, Squid (I dropped the alien part) was water, Goat (I dropped his moniker as well) was plains/outdoor, Giant Spider was dense terrain and Eagle was sky. Regarding the names I wanted a mixture of typical fantasy creatures (Dragon, Stone Golem, Human Warrior, Giant Spider) as well as some mundane creatures (Goat, Eagle, Milipede, Squid) and a few oddball names people wouldn't have heard of before that might get a laugh (Laser Shark, Fire Ghost).

Having figured out roughly what was fighting, and roughly where it was better at fighting, I began making the battlefields and monsters out of card.

Each battlefield was a 3x3 grid (I thought that 9 squares within 1 square might satisfy one of the 10 requirements in case one of the other elements didn't). I coloured the 21cm square grids to represent the battlefield (for instance Cave was black with brown stalgtites).

Mountain

Desert

Sky

Grass

City

Ocean

River

Jungle

Arctic

The characters (henceforth referred to as monsters) would be represented by 7cm square cards that included a drawing of the monster, its name, its attacks, and its preferred battlefields. Using the terrain types as a guide and tweaking so that each monster had preferred terrain that made sense and each battlefield was roughly equally important (this didn't quite pan out, with some places like Arctic being quite common to fight in and some places like Jungle weren't).

I should probably explain the game rules briefly now, you and your opponent choose a monster each, each turn you then roll the energy dice (0-5), energy is used to move and attack. It costs 1 energy to move a square, unless you are in preferred terrain where 1 energy will move your monster 2 squares. Each monster then had an attack that cost energy. Better attacks cost more energy (eg Human Warrior does 1 HP of damage to an enemy 1 diagonal away for 1 energy, Squid does 4 HP of damage to an enemy 1 square directly in front for 4 energy) this meant that monsters that have stronger attacks can't move as far and attack in the same turn. Play goes on until 1 monster is alive.

I paired the monsters up in attacks and number of battlefields there were better in, so Squid and Dragon were equal, Stone Golem and Laser Shark were equal, Giant Spider and Fire Ghost were equal, Goat and Eagle were equal, Human Warrior and Milipede were equal.

Here are the monster cards:

Before we fed back at the end of the day I got a couple of my peers to play the game, and they were keen to do so, unfortunately it was shit. The grid didn't allow for enough movement and the game went on for far too long. The monsters needed to be different distances from each other depending on their attack, and rolling low on the dice meant that you didn't really do anything as it was nigh on impossible to roll high enough to move to the right position and attack. Ultimately the class was impressed by all the stuff I'd made but the game I'd come up with was excruciatingly boring to play.