Meadowvale: Building the Board
(images are of the playtest board and not representative of the final product)
Building the Board
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:
Grassland would be the most common, it’s the open ground of the countryside and gives the map breathing space.
Wildflower meadows would be rare, but act as grassland in most mechanics.
Woodland came next, less frequent but crucial for certain animals.
Then hedgerows and river tiles, connective and strategic.
Farmland represents crop fields and borders with human activity,
And finally, village tiles were the rarest.
What I wanted was for players to play tiles and randomly draw new ones, but for a coherent map to emerge. I did not want a list of rules of where tiles could or could not be placed in order to 'manufacture' a believable map. IN the end I managed to reduce it down to two placement rules that affect the river, and general connectivity.
Let’s start with the river, the only terrain with a strict placement rule. In early versions, rivers could start in multiple places, creating several water systems. But when I zoomed out and imagined the board as a real landscape, perhaps six miles square, it didn’t feel realistic. You wouldn’t get three rivers. You’d get one. That became the defining feature: a single winding river running through the vale, shaping strategy and dividing the board.
River rule:
All river tiles must connect if possible. Once placed, a river tile cannot be blocked or isolated.
For other terrain types, I didn’t want to impose placement rules. Instead, I let the scoring system for wildlife placement guide how players build the map, encouraging naturalistic layouts without forcing them.
For example, Roe Deer score based on the size of the woodland they inhabit. This encourages players to build at least one large forest and a few scattered copses, just like real, fragmented rural woodland. Animals interact in different ways in hedgerows, with the length of hedgerow affecting scoring. Therefore, players are incentivise to join and extend hedgerow tiles, just like in the real countryside, and a reference to the conservation of these wildlife corridors. Farmland and villages provide shelter bonuses to certain animals ensuring that several clusters of these tiles appear across the map, not too fragmented and not one single large dominant area.
Tile counts were refined through repeated test builds, with terrain drawn randomly and scoring logic guiding layout. Obviously, as players pursue their own objectives, the board will shift and change. But these incentives ensure the map still evolves with a kind of ecological logic. After many playtests, the results have been remarkably consistent, maps that could easily represent real countryside not far from where I live.
A late addition to the river rule was that non-river tiles must touch at least two other tiles, to prevent odd branches. This keeps the board coherent and the edges compact.
Scaling:
Solo and 2-player games use the same tile count.
3-player adds 8 more tiles.
4-player adds another 8.
Terrain type ratios remain proportional across all player counts.
The building of the board is one of the loveliest aspects of solo mode, you have full control over how the landscape takes shape.
So, the only tile placement rules are:
All tiles must touch at least two other tiles.
Except rivers, they must always connect to another river tile. River tiles cannot be blocked.
