Hello everyone,

This time, I’ve opted for something rather unconventional for Ludum Dare. I tried to design a board game over the weekend.

Ejderhalar

Link To Game Page

It was Saturday morning. The competition had already begun. I woke up. I took a look at the theme. Shapeshift. Great, either I had to find an artist or I had to make a game about squares turning into triangles. I decided to take a shower and try to come up with an idea.

It was not until I fired up Unity3D after the shower when I first thought about making a board game. I’m a big fan of board games and I have a decent collection of them, too. At first, I thought I could design a game on the table first before I implement it with Unity3D for everyone to play on their computers. Therefore, I closed my computer, took lots of game pieces out of my existing game library and got to work.

Ejderhalar was made over Saturday afternoon and evening combined. I just sat next to my gaming table trying to figure out how I can shift the shapes of game pieces and make an interesting game in the meantime. “Istanbul” is a really good board game that includes a mechanic where you stack tokens on top of each other, only to leave them behind when you’re walking through a grid-like structure. This mechanic inspired me to put my own twist in it and I came up with the creature-like game pieces in Ejderhalar. When it was night, it was clear that I was not going to open my computer just to try to code a mediocre point and click interface for the board game in Unity3D. I stood up and played the game against myself a dozen times instead.

Sunday was spent with playtesting. I called a couple of friends who were available and I arranged meetings with them to play the game. The name of the game came up from one of my friends, who thought that the movement of the pieces resembled a dance of dragons. “Ejderhalar” means “Dragons” in Turkish.

I played 6 games with 2 different people before coming back home. The rules were set in stone in my head by that time. I just needed to write a proper rulebook. I spent all evening and night to create decent illustrations for the examples in the rulebook. There were two hours remaining on the Ludum Dare clock when I submitted the rulebook into the system.

Ejderhalar is a 2-player abstract area control board game about an ancient dance of the dragons. Your goal is to have a token on 3 out of 4 control points on the board before your opponent does. The game has an original movement mechanic that allows players to carry out long term plans.

I know it’s hard to come up with the energy to test a game jam board game, but I’d really appreciate it if you can play it at least once with a real opponent. Even if you are not able to play it, please write a comment on how you feel about the game. I promise a “play, rate and comment” in return for every comment below my game entry.

Thanks for reading my post and for taking a look at Ejderhalar.

Arhan Bakan
https://arhpositive.itch.io/
https://arhanbakan.wordpress.com/