NEMESIS: Board Project - The Tabletop Hub

Hey everyone! It’s been a productive weekend for the Nemesis board project, so as I mentioned in the last update what I wanted to do was take the game board that we have in the actual designs from Awaken Realms and make it functional for MDF/ laser cutting and equally make the board larger to make it more imposing on the tabletop.

What this consisted of was me taking the print-outs of the game board from last update and tracing the layouts. The first draft of this ended pretty quickly:

In this first draft I was basically trying to copy the game board as-is, one thing I began to notice though was that I couldn’t figure out how I’d get those angular corners for the rooms and for some of the corridors. After all this is the first time I’ve ever designed and created a laser-cut piece of tabletop terrain and it goes without saying that I’m going to be a pretty massive rookie at it all.

Therefore my designs have to replicate my skill level…

Basically…they have to be idiot-proof.

So I booted up the Weekender and went back to the literal drawing board. This time around I wanted to make everything a LOT simpler, in essence I started to design with the mentality of ‘if this was being built in Minecraft, how would I build it.‘

So in essence hard corners, sharp angles etc and after a couple of cups of tea, this is what I’ve come up with:

So, before we start celebrating there’s a few things.

1. Thankfully because this is all being designed on tracing paper, we can actually assign a scale to all of this to help with the designing process, BUT:
2. Some of the rooms need redesigning, there are some instances where, for instance, the room’s aren’t symmetrical etc and that will irk me going forward, BUT, at least we’ve got the framework.
3. One thing I need to find out is the importance of the board locations, on some of the rooms and in some of the corridors there are certain numbers which I assume have some importance to gameplay, what I need to do is go and watch a few Let’s Plays of the game from the Kickstarter (or pester Awaken Realms more) to find out more info on this as this will need to translate into the designs, after all the table needs to be functional and work with the game mechanics.
4. Finally, we need to figure out how big the mini’s are to help with the room scaling but we’ll get to that as we go.

But folks that’s it for now, we’re making solid progress and we’ve got a framework, we now enter a process of refinement.

S.