Golden Prince: Print & Play for yourself!

Dropbox Folder Link

Contains rulebook, army cards, 70 unit pieces, 1 crown, and the 4-part board.

Must provide your own 6-sided dice.

Farri Mortalborn

I also spent some time trying out new painting techniques. While it started off as a fairly simplistic practice, it very quickly spiraled into a full-blown piece. Whoops.

However I did learn quite a few handy tricks that I hope to implement in the future on Golden Prince and other projects.

The Golden Prince: Printing and Cutting, Cutting, Cutting

So this weekend I started work on the Golden Prince Print and Play, spending most of Saturday formatting and drawing, and most of Sunday cutting, folding and taping everything together.


 The board and army cards were fairly straightforward, requiring only slight trimming and basic folding in half. The soldiers, on the other hand, had to be designed for easy use, as they will be picked up and moved around quite a lot, and needed to be easy to pick up out of a grouping. Flat pieces would easily flip, scatter, be picked up by breezes, and generally make playing the game a huge pain to play, even if it was easier to cut out.


 My solution was to create elongated 'triangular' pieces, that you would fold over and then tape the two tabs at the bottom together to create a simple base with an easily picked up 'point' that would be finger-friendly in tight groupings. The only problem with this is that, unfortunately, it is very time consuming to individually trim, fold, and tape 90 pieces. Since it was a weekend I decided I would just get to work, starting with trimming and folding all the pieces.



This took roughly an hour and a half. Trimming wouldn't have even been necessary under ordinary circumstances, but the cutting board I used would not cut in a straight line, so I instead had to cut each piece by hand.










The end result, however, more than made up for the misery of the preparation process. The board came out a tad smaller than I had intended, but this will be a fairly quick thing to fix as the board is not in its final stages (the game still needs testing!). I look forward to testing tomorrow, to see how well my initial planning works out.

Golden Prince: Brainstorming Mechanics and Ideas

Just going to start throwing stuff against the wall and see what sticks!

• The king died, and now his son the Golden Prince is coming to take the crown
• But two dukes are much closer, and are eager to have the throne for themselves
• Asymmetrical strategic war game
• 3 Players: 1, the Golden Prince will have an extreme advantage of numbers
• The 2 players must cooperate to beat the third, while also working to beat each other
• Some kind of 'flag' to be captured, probably the crown, placed between the two small teams
• Stats for units printed out onto easy reference cards for each player
• Large team's army consists of stronger units and the widest diversity
• Small teams have specialized soldiers, and must work with each other to use them best
• T-shaped board layout
• The crown starts within easy reach of the smaller teams, but is far enough that if they try to rush for it they will be crushed by the bigger team
• Prince must advance through a long field
• Dukes have small towns on each "branch"
• Simple combat: Each unit has a Swordplay stat which indicates the dice they roll against each other in combat, along with added bonuses for the various unit types. The loser is killed regardless of whether they are the attacker or defender.
• No ganging up; combat is always 1 on 1
• Simple movement: Each unit has a Speed stat that determines the number of squares they can move. No diagonals; must move through adjacent squares
• Unit types: Soldiers (basic troops), Archers (not killed by failing swordplay at range, penalized in melee), Pikemen (bonus against cavalry, penalty against soldiers), Knights (heavy cavalry special to the Prince)
• The 2 players have a weak palisades to defend themselves with, but the Prince's Soldiers can quickly knock them down if they get in range
• While the 2 players' goal is to get the crown into their keep, the Prince needs to eradicate both players to win.
• The chances of the Prince being totally destroyed should be non-existent; the goal is not to defeat him but to get the crown away from the other duke
• Each faction has some blanket bonuses to their soldiers
• The Prince: Strong armor, Knights
• Duke 1: Woodsmen: Archers have extra reach, Soldiers get a bonus against archer attacks
• Duke 2: Light Infantry: Pikemen aren't penalized against soldiers, Faster troop movement
• Manageable troop count: 20-25 for small teams, 50-60 for Prince