Brainstorming process

The initial brainstorming process for the board game involved a lot of thought. One side of the group wanted to do a board game like our card game while the other wanted nothing to do with a game like the old one, so I had to sit down and do a lot of thinking to try and come up with an idea that wouldn't be rejected immediately.

Originally, I came up with the idea of a Restaurant style board game. The board would be divided into four sections and each section would represent a different player's restaurant. The goal of the game would be to be the most successful restaurant while driving all the other restaurants out of business and taking over their areas to expand. There would be sabotage, chef duels, a realistic money aspect, leveling up, and trying to desperately please the Food Critic.

While this idea was well met initially by one group member - and we were already working on a game design document, the whole idea was dashed the moment our group dynamic changed and the idea did not appeal to the other two group members.

It was very difficult to find a compromise between the group since everyone had very different likes and dislikes. To try and pacify the group and appeal to everyone, I then proposed the idea of a Monster Vs. Human game.

Where the basis would be that humans were trapped inside of a haunted mansion with ghosts/monsters and the entire goal would be to out-last everyone else on the board.

The idea was to have courage points as health and to try and escape being terrified by the monsters in the game while also trying to trap the other players so that they get their courage taken away instead of you.

There was a big discussion whether monsters would stay present on the board or if they would be chance card encounters. I suggested that perhaps we could do a compromise and have chance card encounters as well as have some cards be permanent manifestations onto the board and have more debilitating long term effects.

The idea was to have more and more ghosts/monsters such as that manifest on the board so that the longer the game goes on - the harder it is to keep all of your courage.

This was the initial game brainstorming process that I took notes on in my notebook.

Here are some pictures I took of that:

As you can see the 'board' is small, has limited rooms for more close-range activity. There are Item Squares as well as Monster squares.

Items can help you survive against monsters and monster cards are chance monster encounters that may or may not be bad and try to take your Courage.


The little ghost picture above is the idea of a monster/ghost manifesting onto the board during the game. It would be unable to move off of the square, but I proposed that it affect players who are caught in its line of sight. The ghost would have direction arrows (not shown) and each player's move it would turn clockwise (or counter-clockwise depending on what is described on its monster card).




Although these ideas were completely changed in favor of other ideas, these were the initial first brainstorming processes.