Rama's Journey

Rama's Journey is a board game inspired by the Indian Epic Tale Ramayana. This board game was done as a project for my course approaches to play 1. This is my very first board game. 

I started out with the idea of merging ancient Indian tales into games so that people who play the game would understand the story. I tried merging the board game Tigers and goats to Mahabharata but the playtest feedback turned out that it was long to play and didn't work well as it had over 110 intersection points for the 5 Pandavas and 100 Kauravas. As the playtest didn't provide me with good results, I then moved on to look into Ramayana.

 This time, I decided to put my learning from my last board game into this one. So, I made a simple merge of the story Ramayana with the board game snakes and ladders. I wanted to keep it short as players lose interest if the story is too long. I took a part of the Ramayana from where Ram starts his journey after Sita is kidnapped to when he reaches Ayodhya and is named the KIng after his win over Raavan.  I sketched the basic steps first and then tried to embed the steps with jumps and turns in positive and negative actions as per the story. 

The game is simple, You start at the beginning of the board and follow the instructions on the board which narrates the story of Ramayana. Each player has to roll a dice in order to move his/her token across the board from the start to the end.  The board has all the instructions and the rules on the step that they land on. 

All in all, making a board game is a lot more fun than making a video game, you have a playable game within a week or two and then spend the rest of the time making up new or better rules.

Materials Required to Play

1. Board  (Print and Play)

2.  Dice (1)

3. Tokens (2-4 depending on the number of players)

Hope you like the story and have fun playing.