Advanced Media Lab, College of Design

Castle Danger May 31, 2005

Castle Danger

Summer at our house means board games… once America’s pastime, the board game genre has easily been brushed aside facing fierce competition from whiz-bang online games and various other assorted media that vie for your attention.

There is nothing like the sit down, beer & pretzels, meet and greet atmosphere that board games generate. It’s one thing to tear down an opponent in a free for all, first person shooter – it’s another to submit to your Napoleon complex and crush an opponent’s opposing forces face to face with others watching. Not to forget the pleasure one gets at playing slum-lord and forcing other people to pony up this months allowance.

Castle Danger introduces a mixture of Chess, Stratego and old fashioned brute-force to a 2-player, turn-based strategy game. Each turn, a player gets to add another piece to his or her side of the board, move pieces, and shoot cannonballs at the opponent. First to blow up the king wins.

I modified the game board(available for download) and made it into a tri-fold board with landscape imagery from composite artwork and satellite images of Yosemite and the Grand Canyon. I also rebuilt the game pieces from scratch using an old wooden chess set and then hand-crafted, model figurines from Super Sculpey to expand the original game play. We found the smaller board to limit gameplay (although this might have been an original intention) and we liked the idea of adding some other components like a bombadier (limit 2, max move 4 – including detonation) and a trebuchet (limit 2, max move 1, destroys target behind the intitial target wall/piece) into the mix. Matt also includes some other variant rules on his website submitted by users/gamers… Anyways, it’s a fun game with that we’ve rebuilt using “house rules” – build your own or buy one from Matt at his website.