Out In The Outback
Out In The Outback is a board game set in the Australian Outback about growing your animal population size and becoming the dominate animal.
Overview
In Fall 2018, I took a class called Design Across Scales and for one of our assignments we were asked to make a game. We had control to take the game in any direction wether that be digital, card based, or human based ultimately I decided on a classical board game.
Project Members
Nebyu Haile
Programs + Tools used
Adobe Illustrator
Laser Cutter
Ideation + Rules
Taking inspiration from games like Civilization and Catan I wanted to create a game that took a longer amount of time to play, made people think strategically, but also had some sense of randomness. After many ideas I liked the population/society based games but wanted a new perspective so I changed the focus to an animal species population based game.
The game revolves around several species of animals each with their own special advantages and the goal is to go around collecting resources to grow your population with the ultimate goal of reaching 10 game pieces starting from the original 2.
Creating the rules was the hardest part of this assignment by far, it took many trial runs of the game and tweaking of power dynamics to come up with a well balanced game. The entire rules set can be downloaded to the left of this text.
The Game Board
For Out in the Outback, the game board consists of square cards that are laid out into a gird; each card represent a different environment. For the cards I made so vector art in illustrator and then used a laser cutter to etch these drawings into chipboard.
Game Pieces
For the animal game pieces I made some vector images of the animals in Illustrator and then I took a thin piece of wood and etched the images into it. After that I cut them it squares and gave them a base.
Out in the Outback involves the animals to move around and grab resources, so for the resources I got various colored acrylic sheets and cut out a ton of hexagon shapes with notches so they can slide onto the animal pieces, with each color representing food, water, or disease.
Playing Cards
For the playing cards, I made the designs on Illustrator and printed them on card stock.
Final Product + Reflection
Overall I was very happy with how this project turned out, not only did it introduce me to tools such as laser cutting and illustrator but it was an interesting learning experience discovering how hard designing rules for a game can be.
