Ancient Game Tweaking

Sometimes it is good to improve existing games instead of creating a brand new game from scratch. During lectures we have looked at a variety of ancient board games and played most of them. Whilst playing these games, we thought about what made those games enjoyable to play and what we didn’t like about the game.

I mainly looked at Tablut and came to the conclusion that the game seemed unfair and the defending player won most of the games played. As a result, I went through an iterative process of making a single change and then testing it to come up with improvements to the game that made it more balanced and as a result more enjoyable to play. 

The changes I made are:

•         The defending is not allowed to enter any of the attacker’s starting squares, this also means that the king cannot escape on any of these squares

•         The king can be captured by being sandwiched on two sides like any other piece when outside of the throne square

•         The king cannot move back on to the throne square once he has left it

With these changes, I found that the game involved much more strategy and planning from each player and the win ratio was much more balanced.