The Singing Bone
Four brothers enter wicked woods, seeking to hunt the land’s loathsome boar and bring its hide to the King in exchange for immeasurable wealth.
Here, greed will paint the verdant landscape crimson, and those blackest sins of fratricide shall come to light under the pale hum of the Singing Bones.
The Singing Bone, based on the eponymous Grimm’s Fairy Tale, is a competitive strategy board game of vicious intrigue that presents tense combat through and replayability via equipment management, dice-combat, and modular dungeon-crawling—all while creating a procedural narrative of jealousy, murder, and revenge.
Later worked on a visual revamp, supporting the murderous mood of the experience via art direction, and easing the barrier to play through communicative, clever product design.
Genre: Competitive, Deckbuilding, Dungeon-crawling.
Platform: Board Game; 3-4 players.
Tools: Google Sheets, Photoshop CC
Teams: 4-person board game team. Solo visual revamp.
Durations: October 2016; February 2020
Roles & Contributions
Game Designer: modular map design, exploration progression, equipment balance, social strategy system, combat system, game rules writing.
Product Designer: art direction, board and card design, visual systems for mood and information.
Features & Process — Systems of Tension
Traversal Risk & Reward: Three different ‘biomes’ players choose to land on as they progress, presenting a risk of bad consequences alongside a possibility for better equipment.
Scrambled Map: Allows for unique experiences by shuffling map tiles and their corresponding biomes per play session, players will never get fatigued by the board layout.
Equipment: Scavenged from biomes from fallen adventurers, accruing good defenses and offenses constitute the first phase of the game.
Game Phases & Politicking: Designed to follow a dramatic narrative arc: Gearing Up, Boar Hunting, Murder, Escape. Low energy rounds leading to explosive confrontational turns.
Revenge: Players spawn a victory-denying Singing Bone when killed. Encourages kingmaking and a sense of spite as players not in the running heavily affect those that are.
The goal of this board game was to emulate the spirit of the Grimm’s Fairy Tale, The Singing Bone. To do this, I and the rest of the team had to analyze the themes, mood, and progression of the story and make them our game’s experiential goals. We concluded that the tale was an incredibly dark one about all-consuming greed and vengeance, with brothers committing fratricide just to kill a boar and bring it to the King for riches, only for the dead brother’s bones to sing the tale of betrayal and damn his sibling’s wicked deed.
As our game designer, I decided that our mechanics would truly emphasize and motivate greed and betrayal by, pacing in a calm before the storm. We could not just jump to the betrayal, we needed to build up to the story’s dramatic acts: Hunting the Boar, Fratricide, and the Singing Bone’s Karma. Calm came in the form of the game’s ‘Gear Up’ phase, where players start of opposite ends of the forest and spend their first turns traversing and stocking up on armor and weapons—tension still punctuates this interaction as players must make strategic decisions to journey through the treacherous but resource-rich ‘Dense Forest’ biome tiles, the middling ‘Shrubbery’ ones, or the relatively safe ‘Clearings’.
Things sense up when the Boar spawns after three of these setup rounds, and the hunt begins as the player Brothers approach it to kill it and take the head start with its hide, or bide their time waiting to steal it away. Whoever carries the slain animal’s Hide to a forest entrance wins. Kingmaking, the act of a player who is out of the ‘victory’ running ultimately making moves to decide who amongst the winners will truly come out on top, is something that fascinates me, and it was a prudent principle to evoke through the vengeance in this game. Players with the Hide can be killed, and Dead Players will produce a Bone. If a Bone is brought to the forest entrance, its killer cannot win. This immediately introduces levels of politics and spite to the game: Brothers can work together just to kill the one in the lead with the Hide, then turn around and use the Bone to deny the killer victory. Perhaps the Hide-bearer kills a pursuing Brother out of self defense yet a third Brother chooses to not step in and tattle with the Bone. This mirrors jury management in social gameshows like Survivor, introducing social skill to one’s performance in this game: players must cooperate, negotiate, and persuade themselves to victory. It is not sheer luck and mechanical skill, it is dramatic and perfectly in-line with the treachery of the game’s source material.
Another consideration was replayability; obviously different social groups playing will introduce different scenarios, and the equipment draws are random, but I included a modular tile system inspired by the same thing in Catan. Balance under this system is accomplished by keeping the tile ratio at 1:2:1 for Dense:Shrub:Clearing tiles, and allowing players to traverse across more than one tile at a time. This allows the opening rounds, which are already by design the ‘lowest energy’ phase of the game, to be unique between playthroughs, never fatiguing players.
Product Design Breakdown.
The Singing Bone was a Germanic tale about brotherly slaughter. As the game is an adaptation of this story, it was only natural to research the styling of 19th-century European fairy tale illustrations. Particularly, the use of strong values and forms that denote otherworldly suspense, and the textural inking that applies itself to the macabre. Don’t Starve is included as a similar digitally-created touchstone. All in all, the mood is aged, askew, and sinister with clear mark making.
The board is the players’ introduction into the game’s world.
Immediately, the dark aesthetic is there, utilizing natural yet thorny motifs around the active game area to set the tone of what is to come as players venture into the forest.
Divided into four regions by a river and utilizing a modular tile system that is randomized between games, the board presents a level of escalation and treachery through its design. Players must fill in the ever-changing forest by placing 2x2 and 2x1 terrain tiles randomly on the board. To assist with the setup of the game, the board provides contrarily rigid guides for where these tiles go.
These terrain tiles visually vary in both value and textural quality so they are easily readable at a glance, allowing for quick strategic planning while hinting at the level of imminent risk or reward associated with each kind of environment. The sparsest-looking Clearing tiles offer low risk:low reward while the busy-looking dense Forest tiles offer high risk:high reward.
Cards are an integral component of this game and contain most of the information players will access. There are Environment and Item cards.
Environment cards are drawn after player movement, based on the terrain of the tile they land on. For this reason, they have various visual differences and even display an image of the corresponding terrain on the back, so there is no doubt that players are draw from the correct pool.
Item cards have the flairs on their backs oriented in the opposite direction of the Environment cards so it is obvious these cards are different amidst the many decks on the table. Iconography and visual differences deliver information pertaining to where on the body an item is equipped and how they affect the dice-based combat mechanic of the game. This information is located in the upper corners of the cards to take into account how players would hold such things in their hands to allow for quick perusal of relevant strategic information.
There are two special Item cards: a Singing Bone card that is created after a character dies and denies their murderer victory if conditions are met, and the Boar Hide which acts as the win condition. They are specially colored and marked with a special thorny star to denote their importance.
The thorny star also denotes a successful ‘hit’ in combat. The game doesn’t have any need for numbered dice, as long as they roll for a three-in-eight probability, so using custom dice adds polish to the experience while eliminating unnecessary information.
Custom meeple make use of the physical space to convey information. A unique piece for each of the four Brothers, the Boar, and two gameplay-crucial items—the Singing Bone of slain players and the Hide of the defeated boar—which can deny or grant a player victory when brought to a forest exit. These items are intended to be carried, so meeples are deliberately flat on the top, providing all at the table a clear view of who is carrying what.
LESSONS LEARNED
What went well.
Our goal to create tenseness, greed, and a ramping arc of drama playtested splendidly. I am proud to say that the process of boiling a story down to its core feelings and interactions made for such an equally powerful game, bolstered by its mechanics and play experience considerations. Having revamped and simplified some of its systems during its visual rework, it is my favorite board game I’ve designed due to its high emotionality and tight mechanics.
Areas of improvement.
The equipment in this game are simple linear improvements of one another. On one hand, they exist as a simple part of a larger puzzle, provide adequate risk-reward for traversal, feed into a simple dice-competition combat mechanic, and don’t detract from the larger politicking at hand. But on the other hand their inclusion still feels clunky, and some different iteration of this game could likely do away with them completely. In future designs, this self-critique has inspired me to strive towards more streamlined, simplistic design choices where less mechanics do more.
Closing thoughts.
Centering mechanics off a clear arc of tension and explosive drama was a fantastically interesting and required an immense amount of playtesting. I learned a lot about both how to administer these sessions, interview testers afterwards, and how to coalesce the large array of information we received to best propose tweaks to our systems and subsequently playtest those hypotheses to prove them out. Games and their mechanics are not created in a vacuum and this board game was strong because we put so much time into proving it was an effective experience.