7: A Hell of an Escape

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  The back of the Role card which explain the abilities of each of the sins.

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  An example of the front of one of the seven role cards.

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  The back of all of the chaos cards and also the thumbnail art for the game.

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  This is the template used to create all of the rings of hell... This ring is a layer of hell.

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  Image of the board as completed sitting on top of the infamous template

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  Close up of the board

Inspiration

We chose to make a board game because we wanted a multiplayer real life experience that would test the player's true colors. We ended up on the theme if hell because it allowed us to introduce a certain irony. The game is designed such that the players do not need to compete to win, instead, they could use the chaos cards collaboratively to help everyone reach the middle faster and win. However, we were counting on humanity's true colors of selfishness and competition to ensure that the players would choose to work against each other. In this is the irony that the players trying to escape Hell are kept their longer by their selfish nature.

What it does

The game is truly not that complicated. Up to 7 players start in the 7th ring of hell, and work to reach the middle where they escape and the game is won. The game involves a few mechanics to spice things up. As they play, the players can collect chaos cards which allow them to perform special actions that can have negative and positive effects depending on who wins. In addition, there are walls on the board that can't be traversed, meaning that players have to plan out their route to the middle carefully. Finally there are roles which impact the whole game experience in understandable but in depth ways, these completely change the optimal (and sometimes viable) play-styles.

How we built it

The board itself is something of an engineering marvel. The final product is third in a line of boards we made and play tested in order to make sure that the game was fun. Each of the layers is made of backing board and can rotate 360 degrees independently of each other. This allows the players the ability to manipulate the board in order to reach the middle faster or screw over the other players. We made use of a hand drawn paper template (that took 5 hours to do the math for and make) to ensure all of the lines on the board were accurate to a tiny error margin of 0.4cm.

The chaos cards and role cards are all original designs made digitally for this project. They were printed using glossy paper in order to give them some proper weight and make them feel like proper cards. The 7 sin figurines were hand made using thermoplastics and painted using acrylic paints. Finally, the walls themselves were initially drawn using red markers and were then upgraded using clay, making the board 3 dimensional.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into several challenges. Namely making sure that the lines on the final board would be accurate and that the tiles would look the same. As mentioned previously, we spent 5 hours making a template that meant our final board would be made to a high degree of accuracy. Further, we didn't want the board to be unnecessarily large, so after 2 trial designs we came to a cheese wedge design that allows our board to have 7 rings but also not have waste space that nobody would ever travel to.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We feel that rather than making a clone or copying other ideas, we created game in full, with all original assets in a fairly short amount of time.. On top of this, we went through multiple stages of design and play testing in order to ensure that the game was fun and properly paced.

What we learned

Backing board is a cunt i broke 2 scalpels cutting it.

What's next for 7: A Hell of an Escape

Regardless of whether we win or lost, we would like to continue to work on and develop this game in order to properly perfect it.

Built With

• blood
• sweat
• tears