Kingsguard is a perfect information strategy board game I created as an assignment for my Game Studio I: Game Design course. Each player has a king piece, three circle pieces, two square obstacles (which completely block the movement of a piece), and two triangle pieces (the hypotenuses of which redirect the movement of a piece that strikes it and the flat sides of which act as square obstacles). Circle pieces must move continuously until they hit an obstacle or a wall (the direction of this movement can only be changed by a triangle piece); king pieces are allowed to stop at any point of their choice. The goal of the game is to immobilize the other player’s king piece. Players are allowed one movement per turn. King pieces also cannot be captured in the starting position unless two of the other pieces have already been moved out of their starting position, which was a design provision taken to prevent the player that moves first from immediately being able to win the game by trapping the king between one of their circle pieces the other player’s own surrounding pieces. A six-by-six grid was chosen for the board because it maintains a comfortable size as a field of play, in that pieces are kept in close enough quarters for it to be relatively easy to isolate and capture a piece, but not so close that this task becomes too easy without proper strategy.

Kingsguard is one of the pieces that I’ve been the most satisfied with from a game design perspective. Working strictly with perfect information as a game design constraint was interesting since I’m not someone who is particularly good at perfect information games (like chess) from a player perspective; that being said, I think having relatively simple mechanics and a lot of time to playtest with classmates and make adjustments accordingly was helpful. The triangle obstacle in particular went through a lot of revisions, as it was originally a diamond that was placed on the vertices of the board tiles and then was adjusted over time, as the diamond piece being placed on vertices allowed for players to permanently trap each other’s pieces in the corners of the board, which was found to be too obstructive to play. Future goals for Kingsguard involve making it playable by up to 4 players.