Digital interactive map for fantasy board games

Christian Ponikvar (2017) Digital interactive map for fantasy board games. EngD thesis.

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Abstract

In the recent years, board games are making a come back. The amount of people playing them is increasing. In a game where most of the interactions are verbal and imagination based, the battles are conducted on a playing surface with figurines. The issue of how to display the combat environment soon becomes obvious. Most commonly used are drawn sheets of paper, cut out forms and glass surface on which you draw. I am focusing on this problem by displaying the combat surface with a computer. I have been playing the fantasy board game with my friends for the past 7 years, which introduced this problem and gave me the inspiration to tackle it. I want to migrate the building of rooms, buildings and terrains into a computer program. This digital interactive map is displayed on a table, where players move their figurines on. The main difference compared to the existing solutions is the object interactions, for example opening a door and dinamic lighting, which allows limiting vision in darkness. In this thesis there is a short introduction to fantasy board games with rough rule sets, an introduction to the existing solutions, the development of my solution in the game engine Unity and its testing.

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