u/xriposte

Hello, I've been developing a board game called Daydreamers and am having trouble landing on a core board mechanic. I've not gotten to the prototyping stage yet so don't have any hands-on experience with the idea. I'm looking for feedback/thoughts on the system to help shape how I continue designing the game.

A brief synopsis of the game:

Daydreamers is a cooperative deck-builder game for a recommended 4-6 players. The objective is to simply escape the Dream. Players wander around the board, augmenting their combat deck and discovering objectives while combating NPCs and avoiding the wandering Looming Nightmare. Players track their HP with a Dream Guide, and each Dream Guide has a unique ability. If a player's HP is reduced to zero, they flip their Dream Guide over to "Nightdreamer" version of it and becomes an antagonist. Nightdreamers and Daydreamers can combat one another in PvP card battles. Once the Daydreamers find the hidden Dreamcatchers, they can return to the Starting Tile and engage in the world's final (variable) boss. Any surviving Nightdreamers also partake in this combat against the Daydreamers in a winner-take-all fight.

I glazed over a ton of other details and working mechanics, but this is summary enough to get the idea across.

My conundrum:

The board itself is where my problem lies. My ideal version is one where the board is made of modular hexagonal tiles, like Catan. With the exception of the Starting Tile that is always at the center, the board is randomly arranged at the start of each game to allow for some fresh experiences each time.

The Tiles have two sides, a Daydream side and a Nightmare side.

All Tiles start on their Daydream side, which have small benefits to Daydreamers that stand on them.

The Tiles can periodically be flipped to their Nightmare side, however, which can have harmful effects to Daydreamers (but beneficial effects for Nightdreamers).

So that's where my problem lies - flipping the hexagon Tiles. It would be an action that happens fairly frequently throughout the course of the game, and I can't come to a consensus whether or not that would be an annoying action to ask players to do throughout the game, especially if the tiles are butted up against one another like in other hexagonal-based board games.

I've considered a pre-configured board that has a shallow well for each hexagon Tile to rest in that allows for much easier manipulation without disturbing the board around it, but my ideal scenario is to have a game board that can be as big or as small as a group of players want (though I'd have a recommended size, of course). But if two people were to come together with two copies of the game and want to make a super Dream, then the configuration would allow for that.

Am I overthinking this? Or should I consider some other board configuration?

Thank you in advance!