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Fog of War

Fog of War is a board game created with Tracy Chou and Vivian Wang. Flip tiles as you move across the board, revealing elements that affects your strategy.


Interaction design for the uninitiated

To provide a little context on this project, CMU Design has a freshman game project, where we're asked to create some kind of game out of scratch. I worked with Vivian Wang and Tracy Chou. Freshman year at CMU is filled with odd projects that expose you to a balance of disciplines and experiences. I remember really enjoying the project for the long conversations that we had discussing things like reducing friction to play, satisfying interactions, educating the user, and replayability. Years later I think of it as our first real interaction design project. I'm fond of it for that reason, and I still get a lot of interest in the project from others as well.

In our initial ideation sessions, we were drawn towards classic abstract strategy games that had simple rules and interactions. When brainstorming over classic war concepts, we came up with an interaction inspired by the concept of "fog of war" —the uncertainty of conditions in which conflict unfolds.


Playtesting in the university center at CMU. We used chinese chess pieces and matboard for tiles.
The project page organizes process by iterations.

Iterating and playtesting

After we made some initial product decisions and created working prototypes from paper, we had our first experience with playtesting and user research, which was a big learning experience for us.

Our initial testing was full of fumbling around and getting people's general opinions. While it felt collaborative and was helpful to hear people's ideas, we soon learned that it was more effective to test for specific, measurable responses to different variables. We found that people were more satisfied by shorter, faster games on a smaller board, within a threshold. Playtesting also helped us discover flaws in our rules and the most strategically satisfying "terrain" elements to hide under the game's tiles.



The game starts with the tiles smoked-side up, and players flip them with each move. Elements on the back of board tiles affect the strategy and outcome of the game. The cover of the box flips over to be the playing board. A small game board (7 by 5) makes for short enjoyable games that leave you wanting a rematch!
The physical game uses lasercut wood, smoked to communicate fog, and frosted marbles for playing pieces.

The final game

We made liberal use of school's laser cutter to make a physical board and box out of wood. The pieces are frosted marbles, each side has a king which is opaque. When the game begins, players shuffle and place the tiles smoked-side up on the board, providing an element of chance to every game. Tiles fit perfectly into shallow recesses engraved in the board's surface, making an audible click clack as the game unfolds.

The King piece moves one square at a time in any direction, confined within a 3 by 3 square, called the King's Court. Normal pieces move diagonally across the board any distance. The player flips over the tile his piece lands on, revealing one of four elements or a blank tile (land).

The elements persist throughout the game, affecting each player's strategy. Enemy pieces are captured by sandwiching them between two of your pieces across any distance on the board, allowing for surprising and even multiple captures.



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