I thought I'd share my thoughts about a "Stronghold" type game I've been thinking about. It's all been inspired as you might expect by playing the computer game called Stronghold. The computer game is a series of missions where you build a castle and all of the means to support it against attacks, or until your able to make attacks your self against another castle.

I want to make a board game that's based on that. I dont want to call it "Stronghold" or use any of the graphics from the computer game, I'd like it to be all original.

Anyway I've sketched out some preliminary ideas and I'll share them here with the hope of some feedback.

Ive sketched three types of board that this preliminary version uses. The first is the "Stronghold" board. Each player will get one of these placed in front of them. This is the core of the players position on the board.



In the centre of the board is the stronghold that as a player you will defend and will attack your opponents versin of. The six numbered spaces round the stronghold are defensive positions, each can be empty or contain a wooden pallisade counter ot a stone wall counter. The pallisade and stone-wall counters must be removed before stronghold itself can be attacked. Pallisade is easier to attack than stone wall.

Three pathways lead out from the stronghold, the top one leads to the middle board ( more later ) and the two side ones lead to other players stronghold boards. the circles indicate spaces that have to be moved through..

The dotted arches indicate ranges of the two types of archers when they are in the stronghold, thus enemy units in these spaces may be attacked at range. At the moment my idea is that archers can also move out of the stronghols and still attack at these same ranges.

Lets take a look at the economic management board. Once again each player gets one.



Across the top are the four resources. Wood, Stone, Iron and Leather. the little circle is for the placement of a "builder". I'm thinking that each player gets two builders and they can place these together or seperate. So at the start of a turn all player place the builders on their mat.

For each builder placed they get a resource of that type. For wood they simply get a Wood cube, placed in the big resource circle where it is ready to be used. For stone, iron, and leather the cube gets placed in the top half of the resource circle. This is the product in its raw state. In this condition it cant be used. They player will have to spend actions in later turns to move the cube from its raw state to it's processed state in the other half of the circle.

The "Building Soldiers" section is where you accumalate resource to build soldiers of the various types. So for a spearman you would have to place three of your wood cubes onto the indicated spaces, and likewise for each of the soldier types. To place a cube here, you have to move it from the appropriate resource space, using an action to do so. When all of the resource spaces are filled, you get a soldier counter of that type placed in your Stronghold and the cubes used to build it are returned to the central pool.

The Tech level track on the right, is another place where you can place spend resource. You start being able to make spearmen, but by placeing resource into the tech track you can get better and better troop types. Although not on this sketch I envision each space on this track being a particular resource type.

The next board is just a board that gets placed between the players and shows a track along which troops may be moved to reach your opponents.



Next up I've throw together a combat table. Player actions may be spent to attack, which I envision as being a simple die roll. When opposing units share the same space on the boards, they may attack, The attacker/defender is cross referenced and the die rolled, getting equal to or above is a hit.



So I envision a resource pool of 3 wood, 2 iron, 2 leater and 2 stone being placed in the center of the table each turn and these are all that is available to be picked up that turn.

Players then place thier builders

Resources are claimed starting with a starting player, one per player until all possible claims are made.

Then each player gets to take 3 actions. An action can be...

Move one soldier.
Attack with one soldier.
Move a resource ( such as from Ore to Processed, or from Wood to Spearman, or from Processed to Tech )
Build a soldier ( and return the recorces )

So there you have it. My initial sketches and thoughts. I'd like to invite anyone to contribute thoughts and ideas, critisisms and flames to this thread

When you have sorted out the rules and want a gametester I´m up for it... seems interesting and fun :)

Make a quick playable protype so we can test it.
Inspiring!

Shouldn't the bow range be farther out than the cross bow range?

Loved Stronghold - great game..

good luck with that.. looks fun!

That's a good point.

Looks promising indeed!

Simple, yet elegant. Not much bookkeeping (if any), simple mechanics...

I am in for a look at the rules

I think the key will be to make the combat as varied as possible to where there are a few different ways to make progress towards victory. Other than it just being a race to build the biggest army and knock down the walls.

It looks pretty sweet and I enjoyed the computer game as well. I am available to do some graphics if you need it when the time comes.

Thats a concern but that said I think this base game concept could easily be enhanced by replacing the centre board with scenario specific boards that contain objectives, or as another BGGer suggested the ability to build outlying forts.

And thanks for the offer

That is something that I am struggling with in Skirmish Wars right now. The need for objectives and such is more important that I first thought it might.

Have you thought about making a co-op scenario with an AI driven enemy?

no that sounds pretty cool, but I would have zero idea on how to do something like that.

Would you amass resources from turn to turn? I assume the pool of resources each turn is simply what is available to harvest that turn.

Yep, thats the idea.

To the AI possibility:

I guess you would have to collect statistics on game turn choices and their usage and then put it all into a simplified table to be rolled on with a die (6 or 10-sided, depending on the choices available),

Additionaly, some of the choices could only be made if a particular choice has been rolled previously.

(Have no idea as to what exactly happens during a turn in the game, so... )

Just a couple of quick notes. It might be better to refer to your "builders" as "workers" or "laborers", as they aren't really building anything, so much as they are processing raw materials. Also, you might consider renaming the "Building Soldiers" section to "Equipping Soldiers" or "Arsenal". Then you would be spending your resources at the arsenal's factories/smithies to have armorers manufacture weapons which are then used to equip soldiers. Thematically, I can understand needing to spend 3 pieces of lumber to manufacture spears; but it's much more difficult to believe that I can build an actual spearman out of 3 pieces of lumber (unless of course you're building golems who carry spears ). Other than nit-pickings about word choice, I was wondering what the Stone resource was used to build - as it doesn't appear in your player mat. I would assume it's used to build or rebuild walls for your Stronghold.

Cheers,
Sean

Some nice pointers there, thanks.

The six spaces around the stronghold are for placing walls. So you can place a wooden or stone item in those spaces to represent walls.