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+--- Thread: DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) (/showthread.php?tid=18)
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-13-2026
After thinking about this, i'm going to move this into active projects. It requires fairly minimal rules, drawing the map tiles would be the biggest time sink. I spent some time today looking at how much it costs to have map tiles and such printed, and I can get 24 double-sided, professionally printed tiles on heavy card stock for about 20 bucks (at minimum quantity order). Im wondering if 24 tiles is enough for a randomly constructed town. each tile would be 4.75 X 4.75 inches, so I could do a 4X4 inch grid on each one with some border elements. A building would be maybe 1-4 cards, and I would think a "town" map would consist of 5-8 buildings, but you would also need some connective bits like roads in between and whatnot. So that makes me think I would need to get maybe a double order of cards, so 48 double sided cards would cost around 37 dollars (Im now in the discount for larger orders) and would allow me to have a maximum of 8 or 10 buildings of 1-4 tiles each plus some connecting roads and maybe some extra tiles for town elements. Being double-sided, I would be able to use essentially 96 unique tiles to build a 48 tile map with. Also I wouldn't need to use all 48 tiles, maybe some towns are tiny. In fact the size of the town could be random. Maybe there's just 3 fisherman shacks. Also, I might want to reserve some of the 96 tile faces for set pieces that are not random.
Still thinking on this. Im also not sure I want this in japan because I would have to draw japanese architecture and scenery and i not confident I know that well enough. It would need to be some place with a lot of water connecting many towns and villages or the conceit doesn't work. I guess I could just make a place up.
Other things: Are the players plastic miniatures? Are the zombies/monsters? It would be cheaper to do cardboard tokens, and printplaygames has some nice ones. They also have some cardboard standee type things which I guess would work but im not sure that's better than tokens. Do i want 3D elements like doors and objects you can loot, such as dressers/chests/toolboxes etc that you place on the map? I think tokens for objects would be fine. A double sided token for "closed" and "open/looted" would be fine I think, you would just flip it over after looting it. 3D doors might be good so you can easily see where the openings for buildings are. Using tokens for doors might be harder to see. On the other hand, not only are tokens cheaper than 3D objects, but it keeps the overall size of the game down, too. Being able to pack the game easily into a bag would be a bonus. If everything is just a card or a flat token, that would make it a lot smaller of a box. I could do standees for doors rather than 3d printed objects. They would be mostly flat, once removed from the plastic base, but the bases would take up room in the box.
I can get 24 double-sided standees (with a rounded top) for $13.55 on the same 2mm cardboard used for tokens. I can use 10 of those for player characters you can choose from and then have 14 remaining for monsters. Is 14 monsters per map enough? I think probably? Assuming you aren't reusing monsters from the dead pile as you go. maybe 8 generic zombies, 4 tougher things, and 2 boss type things?
For doors, I can get 21 1x2 inch double-sided rectangle tokens that will fit in the plastic stands also just fine, made out of the same 2mm cardboard. I don't know that I would need 21 doors. I would need at least 10 external doors, and I could see having some internal doors maybe for larger buildings. I could use the remainder of these for larger objects to loot, or other things on the map. A sheet of those will also run 13.55.
I can get 70 double-sided 1-inch square tokens printed on 2mm thick cardboard for $13.55.
all told I would be at about $100.00 in tiles, tokens, and plastic bases for the standee things, and that doesn't include the printing for the box itself, plus an instruction book, plus cards for items and equipment and whatnot. That's not really a big deal for prototyping but its waaaaay out of bounds for a finished product. even with volume discounts I would have to probably charge $100.00 per game and that's a no go. I can probably find a cheaper printer (printplaygames is actually on the expensive side, but is known to be pretty high quality, and mostly used for prototyping). I might be able to get it down to $60 or $80 with a cheaper chinese printer, but its hard to say what kind of quality and consistency I would get.
https://www.printplaygames.com/product/cards-large-square/
https://www.printplaygames.com/product/1-00-squares/
https://www.printplaygames.com/product/1-x-2-rectangular-tokens/
https://www.printplaygames.com/product/1-00-x-2-00-stand-ups/
https://www.printplaygames.com/product/plastic-stands-small/
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-13-2026
I have some free sample cards coming from printplaygames so I can judge thicknesses and whatnot.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - BigPete - 02-13-2026
would you like Active/Inactive thread prefixes in this subforum?
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-13-2026
nah. inactive projects just wont get a thread.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-19-2026
Built an Affinity template for the map cards. Its irritating because its very clear that P&P is working with analog measurements which means their templates don't actually match their stated sizes. They're off slightly. This is pretty common and its why you have a bleed, but I wish they would have given me actual numbers instead of a template I have to measure myself.
In other news, I really really like the new affinity mega-app all in one thing, and I didn't think I was going to because I hate change in general. But its so nice to be able to just switch over from layout to image editing by changing tabs on the same project.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-19-2026
upload_2026-2-19_14-40-16.png (Size: 11.27 KB / Downloads: 40)
here is their template sitting on top of their actual measurements.
This kind of thing probably only bothers people who work mostly digital, like me. People who deal in real physical objects know that this is inevitable.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - BigPete - 02-19-2026
Digital Prophet, post: 2269820, member: 28507 Wrote:this is infuriating
here is their template sitting on top of their actual measurements.
This kind of thing probably only bothers people who work mostly digital, like me. People who deal in real physical objects know that this is inevitable.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-19-2026
upload_2026-2-19_15-56-34.png (Size: 2.67 MB / Downloads: 40)
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Digital Prophet - 02-24-2026
So I've been thinking about this and I'm getting things kind of hammered out. Originally, I was envisioning that the game master would lay down the tiles from a prebuilt map, but now I kinda want it to be randomly generated. The problem with that is that if I want the tiles to be double-sided, that makes that kind of hard. Well, harder, anyway. Im going to have to figure out how the generation will work. In my head I think maybe you separate the tiles into categories. Like there would be "path" tiles and "room" tiles, and you would draw from each pile based on where the players are going. if you're going down the road, that's a path tile. Some of the path tiles would have offshoots to one side or the other or both that would lead to a building. If the players move down an offshoot, you would then draw from the building tiles.
So far, that's pretty easy. The building tiles would look something like what I have up there in the post above. a 4X4 grid with some space around the edge. The question is, do I add walls to the tiles or leave them as open grids like that above. Say doors (and windows?) are a separate object piece you place on the edge of the tile. How big is the building? Do you roll a dice for number of building tiles? If I add walls to some of the tiles, that would naturally end the building because there would be a wall there. Unless you place doors on the walls and now you can put a tile on the other side of the wall. Buildings have more than just a front door. I think I want a building to be a maximum of 2X2 tiles except for specific set pieces that would be for story purposes. So you COULD roll 1d4 and that would tell you how many building tiles to add to the building. Still thinking about it.
DP's Projects: The Ferry (board game) - Jim Rockford - 02-25-2026
You can make a table of die results and tile types if you have a lot of tiles to choose from, but want some more than others. I forget which game does this, but one of them does.