When I am spending several hours inking plates and running them through the printing press — knowing I have 50–60 images to create using this method — I do find myself asking this question: why printmaking?

Growing up I loved chess, I got it from my Dad. We would play when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old. In my last blog, I wrote about how adding movement to Meadowvale completely changed what I thought was a finished turn cycle. I half-joked that it had become the chess of nature games — and the more I play, the more the comparison sticks.

One of the later additions to the rules was the introduction of movement. Originally, Meadowvale was a static puzzle: a tile and token–laying game with scoring that was derived from real animal behaviour.

Meadowvale is a board game where theme drives mechanics. From rabbits in clusters to owls with line of sight, every placement echoes natural behaviour. This post explores the design choices behind Meadowvale’s core mechanics and why they belong in the Vale.

The River Leam near my home winds through the countryside to the east. It rarely grows wider than a few metres, glimpsed running under bridges or alongside a wood when out walking. It flows through Leamington Spa, flooding only at the weir in Jephson Gardens, before joining the Avon at Warwick. From there, it flows to the Severn and finally the estuary.

The UK has hedgerows that are hundreds of years old. These were always going to be a main feature of Meadowvale. They provide crucial ecological corridors through the landscape.

From the beginning, it was always going to be a tile-drawing and placement game. The landscape would build up over time, shaped by the players. Hexes made the most sense as they allow for natural growth, structure, and branching shapes.
Animals would be placed onto a shared board, not individual player areas. They’d score based on where they were placed and what was around them, both in terms of terrain and other animals. The scoring was always meant to happen at the end, so all mechanics had to avoid any kind of mid game calculations.

In Meadowvale, an early design principle followed a similar train of thought. Start with no rules, and then add one at a time and see if it was necessary. At every decision point, ask the question, was that necessary? does it help onboarding? does it break the flow? and so on.

Next diary entry is all about how the board is built. Here it all sounds quite easy, but it did take quite a while to work out how this was going to work. From the outset, I wanted the board to feel organic, something that would grow, not just fill space. Hex tiles were the obvious choice. Once I had the terrain types defined, the next challenge was deciding how many of each to include. This changed quite a bit but after some trial and error, I settled on a rough ecological logic:

The Wintering is an elegant two-player abstract strategy game set in an ancient woodland. The idea for this game has been with me for quite a while, not so much the theme, but the board and the mechanics. I revisited it while working on Meadowvale, looking for a companion title. The original rules, just four of them, had been in place for some time and worked fine. But it still lacked that one ‘game moment’ where layered strategy suddenly reveals itself.