I have decided to take the plunge and finally start sharing my game development ideas. I, like probably everyone else in this hobby, have long dreamed of making my own game. For years I have started and half-assed making my own thing. I have notebooks and notebooks of work, gigs and gigs of files, and halfway finished attempts.

Today I am making the commitment to actually make something, get it across the finish line, and share it out with the world. So to start, I need to say:

This game is an independent work and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the LEGO Group. LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not authorize, sponsor, or endorse this product.

With that out of the way, my plan is to create a tabletop roleplaying game that I can play with my kids, ages 4-6, and have a good time. The ruleset will be M.I.N.I.S. agnostic so you can use whatever you have. We will be using what I like to call MINIS:

Modular
Interlocking
Narrative
Icon
System

If you don’t have any MINIS, you can use your boring Warhammer figures, as everything will be based on base size. Small (24mm) - Medium (32mm) - Large (50mm) - Gargantuan (Bigger than 50mm)

There’s a lot of punnery and tomfoolery going on there.

First order of business is condensing the main stats into something more manageable and understandable for a kid. I want to establish my design philosophy and it will be most present here. Easy enough for a kid to follow along, but still engaging enough for adults to have fun.

I also want to make it clear that I have no idea what I am doing. I have played a lot of games, I have done a lot of software dev, product management, and lifecycle management though, so I am just going to try and approach it systematically and in a way that makes sense for me.

Bases & Boards

I want to start by defining base sizes and board sizes because from that point I do not actually need any figures and can playtest with just basic tokens on a basic board and not get caught up in the minutiae. So here they are:

Bases

Small - 2x2 round plate or 24mm base
Medium - 4x4 round plate or 32mm base
Large - 8x8 round plate or 60mm base
Giant - Either no base or anything beyond 60mm

Boards

Scene - 1 MILS plate or 12x12 inch square
Standard - 2x2 MILS plates or 24x24 inch square
Skirmish - 3x3 MILS plates or 36x36 inch square

These are the basic game sizes I think will suit my needs, and alliteration is always good. I think most RPG scenes will be on a single 32x32 brick nub area, think chessboard size, and then most encounters will be on the 24x24 inch area. Think Ultimate Dungeon Terrain style or kitchen table area. Then I plan on making rules for a full skirmish game as well, and I love 3x3 for bigger battles.

A 32x32 plate matches up nicely to 4x4 rounds, which is the majority of what our base sizes will be, and allows for 2 smaller bases to fit in a grid. The 8x8 models will take up 4 squares on our grid. This means that our standard board will be 8 squares by 8 squares.

The base sizes match up pretty well so it will work for real figures or brick-based ones.

To account for different size differences, I will use bases for drawing line of sight, think silhouettes like Infinity. The board sizes also line up roughly with the recommended encounter sizes in 4e D&D, which was heavily grid and figure-based, and I am one of the few people that seemed to love 4th edition. For anything over 60mm—essentially giant models—they will essentially always be able to be seen, so don’t need to worry about line of sight unless they are in a different room. To keep the rules tight, anything over 60mm will just have true line of sight in the finished rules.

Now that we have bases and the confines of a play area, we need to figure out how minis will move throughout the game world. Traditional values are 5 squares / inches a turn. I want to add some granularity here so we will keep movement values to: