Summary

• Walking Hadrian's Wall was a challenge.
• While walking, I created a two-player board game inspired by the Romans building the wall.
• The game involves strategic gameplay between Romans and Britons, still in early stages of development.

I attempted to walk the length of Hadrian’s Wall in my week off last week. However, as someone whose work forces them to be entirely sedentary and weekends are spent matching a toddler’s pace, I was woefully underprepared for the task. My brother and I had planned to split the 84 miles into six days of hiking, carrying all of our equipment on our backs. After the first day, a gruelling 17-miler through the city of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Newcastle in the baking English summer, we knew w♌e’d made a mistak𓃲e.

▨Quickly after, we ditched our ~20kg packs to travel light, as every other hiker we came across had also done. But the damage had been done. I had a pus-filled blister that reached across the sole of each foot, not from ill-fitting hiking boots but from the impact of heavy steps in the sunshine. A day later, my knees started to give way, likely as much thanks to my limping gait as the constant inclines.

A company most s🅠uitably named Hadrian’s Haul transported our bags from campsite to campsite.

I made it nearly to Carlisle, walking four days out of the intended six. My brother, much less injured but still abs🥃olutely knackered, finished the final two legs of the journey for an impressive feat. I’m proud of what♛ I achieved, especially as I got to see the middle section of wall with awe-striking cliff faces and long sections of remaining wall (there were practically none on the first or last two days). But I couldn’t in good conscience buy myself a cool t-shirt with the words “I Walked The Wall” emblazoned on the front.

Similarly, the only cool thing in any of the museum gift shops we passed (at forts like Vindolanda and Birdoswald) was a full suit of Roman armour, something that I could neithe๊r transport in my backpack nor find space for at home. As such, I was souve꧑nirless. Unless…

Ladies and gentlemen, we made a board game. I may be a writer and I may play games, but I’ve never tried to make a board game before, unless you count glueing 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lord of the Rings characters to a Monopoly board as a kid and just playing Monopoly except you buy Gotꦿhmog and Bill the Pony instead of Old Kent Road a🔯nd Mayfair.

You’ve got to remember, you need ways to pass the time when you’re spending 11 hours a day walking with your buddy. We tried naming our favourite starter Pokemon from each region and then overall (Cyndaqu💝il for me), our favourite Legendary Pokemon (Lugia), our favourite basic Pokemon that doesn’t evolve (Kanghaskhan? Pinsir?), our favourite middle-stage Pokemon (Dragonair, but Piloswine is close), our Eeveelution tier lists, our teams if we were Gym Leaders (it’s Electric-types, you can guess at the full list).

We ran through our Warhammer piles of shame, what we were watching and playing at the moment, we booked some theatre trips into our calendars, and then we realised that about two and a half hours had passed since we’d started walking. Considering there was about a dozen hours of B-road to walk al🍬ong before we got to the good stuff, there had to be something else to chat about.

So I verbalised something I’d been pondering for a little while, an idea that൩ had been percolating i﷽n my mind and baking under the midday sun. A two-player board game, where one player takes control of the invading Romans and attempts to build Hadrian’s Wall starting from Wallsend in the east and ending in Bowness-on-Sea in the west, and the other player controls the Britons desperately trying to stop this attempt to colonise and divide their country.

It’s a simple idea, but we worked through the early stages of prototyping entirely in our minds. We figured out how the Romans would build the wall (units can🥂 choose to Defend or Build on each turn), how many turns it would take to build each sect🌌ion of wall (one unit three turns, but three units one turn, etc.), and how the native Britons could disrupt it (attacking wall sections to destroy and disrupt them).

It’s not a pitched battle scenario, the goal for neither side is to wipe out the other, and doing so should be incredibly difficult. We scaled the wall itself down to ten sections, we worked out approximate strengths for each force, and we even did some (very basic) playtesting entirely in our minds. Kind of likﷺe Iron Bull and Solas playing mind chess, except with a game we were constantly tweaking the rules of and neither of us turned evil at the end.

In the evenings, I would write down our developments, and by the end of day four, my final night of camping for the week, we had a finished ruleset. We’ve probably overlooked some incredibly basic points and we definitely haven’t playtested enough to hav♏e fully balanced the game, but it’s a game nonetheless. I plan on releasing it at some point, probably as an A4 PDF distributed for free on Itch.io, but it needs a lot more work.

At the moment, only Britons can initiate combat (a rule I like a lot), and roll a d6 for each attacking unit on a section of wall, compared to the Romans’ d10s per unit. The Romans are heavily armoured defenders versus the naked attackers, and are forced by the turn limit to stretch their forces thin in the name of expansion, so need to be powerful. Builders are busy mining and bricklaying, however, so may not be used in combat, which should further balance things. Completed sections of wall will also buff the R✨omans, but whether that’s by d3 or a flat 3 is yet to be decided.

This system has worked in a couple of single-battle simulations so far, but we need to 🅘spend a few hours with 🐻this ‘finished’ prototype before we can know for sure. Crucially, though, since I’ve been home and had access to the internet, I’ve realised that there isn’t already a similar game out there, which was a major worry as we were mind-designing.

I may not have got a celebratory t-shirt, I may not have walked the entire width of the country in the footsteps of eဣarly 2nd century legionaries, but I did co-create a board game that I think migh🌄t be a little bit fun. And that’s what touching grass is all about, right?