​We have the basic layout of the game ​decided however ​I want to be sure that movement does not become a major impediment to peoples enjoyment while playing.

Welcome to our first update on where we are with design right now.

So a couple of things that we really love the idea of.

Firstly the shops being randomly placed by the players around the board edge so that each time you play it’s going to have a slight variation on what it did before.

It means that the different shops can be in different locations each time you play and it’s completely up to the players how that setup happens. It randomizes the actual game design a little bit for you, which we quite like.

One of the important things that I really wanted to have was the ability to move quickly through the shopping centre. The idea being that you will be starting at the escalators and moving through the shopping centre into the stores to find the toilet paper. I didn’t want that actual movement process to be something that becomes arduous and draws away from the fun of the game because you get stuck.

We’re making the tiles big enough that it might take you two good roles to get across to the other side of the shopping centre. Obviously that’s part of the game play, but I really don’t want movement to be something that hinders people’s joy of the game.

So I am trying to find a way to make that easy and one of the ways that we wanted to do that was give players the ability to move through the store in any direction.

We started with hexagons being the floor tiles, which works really, really well in that idea of being able to move in any direction from a location, but it posed a little bit of a problem in the way that we get in and out of stores when we placed those stores around the edges because the shape of a hexagon changes when you’re looking at it from one side to the other.

That might be an easy fix. It might be something that we can solve quite easily, whether that’s by making the stores have entries and exits on both sides so that depending on which side of the board you place it on, just depends which way you rotate the shop.

The other option is to actually change the tile design. The next iteration of that became diamonds.

An issue with the diamonds was that it’s not clear when you’re moving that you can move from diamond to diamond rather than from flat side to flat side, from point side to point side.

That to me felt, as a player, that it would be very unclear, so I didn’t want to keep it like that. We’re now looking at the possibility of actually just making them circles that will sit in a similar design to what hexagons are.

It gives you that ability to move in all those directions and we’ll be a little bit more of a universal shape around the board edge.

We only need to put one entry and exit point on the store is we can design that so that it will sit against those circles and create entry and exit points easily no matter which side of the board is on.

So again, it just simplifies the setup, which is important.

So that’s where we are with that part of the design process at the moment, looking at what’s going to be the best player fun in the way that we move through the space of the game itself.