Meadowvale: Starting Decisions
My Background...
I’m a printmaker, composer, and educator. I live just north of the Cotswolds, the heart of the British countryside, and I cycle a lot. Most days, and over long distances.
That means I get to watch the seasons shift across the land. Bluebells through the trees. Mist in the hollows. Dew clinging to hedgerows. The change in light. All glimpses and emerging vistas, always different, and always suggesting stories. The small details. All of that observation feeds into what I do, artwork, music, and now this game.
Starting Point: Format
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.
And more importantly, I wanted the mechanics to come from the ecology. I wasn’t going to build a scoring system and then apply a theme. The whole idea was to begin with the real behaviour of animals and habitats, and shape everything from there.
Design Decision 1: Habitats
Choosing the correct terrain tiles was driven by ecology. The British landscape has very few truly wild areas. It is made up of small woodland areas, some of which are protected ancient woodlands that used to cover the majority of the British Isles. The rest is managed grassland, including grazing land, and crop growing farmland. Included in this terrain type are wild meadow fields. These are a rare sight now in the UK. Fields are separated by hedgerows. The first decision was to make a make tiles that represented this rich mixture of habitats. These are the seven types of terrain I decided on:
Woodland some of it ancient and protected.
Grassland pasture, grazing fields, open land.
Wildflower Meadows increasingly rare now.
Farmland usually for growing crops.
Hedgerows thousands of miles of them, acting as wildlife corridors.
Streams and rivers forming natural lines and barriers
Villages the human edge of the map, but part of the system too.
Design Decision 2: Wildlife
The UK doesn’t have dramatic predators or exotic species. But it does have character, animals that are deeply familiar, beautiful and tied into local stories and folklore.
I chose species that make sense in this space. Animals that tell an ecological story when they’re placed.
• Red Fox — clever, opportunistic, charismatic. The symbol of Brass Fox Games.
• Barn Owl — silent hunter. Its line-of-sight mechanic came early and stayed.
• Badger — strong, slow, rooted in hedgerows and woodland.
• Hedgehog — adaptable but fragile. It needs shelter to thrive.
• Kingfisher — solitary, territorial, strictly tied to rivers.
• Roe Deer — quiet, alert, seen at woodland edges and field margins.
• European Rabbit — not native originally, but embedded into the ecosystem over centuries.
Summary
So that’s where it began. Build a landscape that feels real. Place animals into it that behave like they do in life. And let the scoring emerge from those relationships, not from a system imposed over the top.
The points matter, but they’re not the point.
The real goal is to tell an ecological story every time you play, and each game really does play out differently.
Thanks for reading. In the next few posts, I’ll go into how the map builds itself using only two simple rules, and how that led to terrain placement incentives, and eventually the animal scoring system.
