Beginning Game Board Design

     Before starting to design my game board I laid out all the different trading card boards that I had purchased a Wal-Mart the other day.  First I was looking at the different sizes ranging from 8 in. X 18 in. to 22 in. X 22 in.  For my board I decided that I was going to go with a four sided foldable board where the playing field that is being used measures 20 in. X 20 in..  Then was looking at the lay out of each board and the color schemes.  I have decided to go with a medium ranged blue for the home team colors and an orange for the away team, both of these I believe look good over the top of the green fields(besides  hockey).  Before I started constructing one of the game fields I had to figure out the dimension of the field, outlines for card placement.  After measuring everything out on a piece of graph paper, I started building a football playing field with a white piece of thick art board and colored construction paper.  After a few hours of gluing and cutting I had my first edition football game board.

     I actually really like the out come here.  But I forgot to put in a place for your deck of cards, a discard pile(in this game the discard pile will be call the ineligibles) and your in-play cards(in Magic these would be your traps or spell cards, here they are going to be plays or trick play cards).  This art board was also only 16 in. X 20 in., which gives me an additional 2 in. to play with on each side of the field.  Also my field calculations were a little off and the field is only 19 in. long with an inch boarder on each side.  This gives me a little bit more to play with as well.  Also each 10 yard strip of field is only an inch wide.  I think that the yard markers are a little squished so I would like to maybe shorten the end zones a little and make the field slightly bigger so there is a little bit more gap of green between the yellow.  I also think that my next board I will be making digitally on Gimp instead of trying to construct it physically and wasting product.  I will be spending the day I have off today learning more about how to use Gimp to improve my cards and play fields.  Any suggestions from my readers would be greatly appreciated in the comment form.  I hope to hear from some of you soon.

- SRock

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