Tabletop Game: Kufuru

Giant bees, a cave that’s filling up with water, and ghosts. Your task, and the task of the others that have found themselves with you, is to escape.

This was a lot of fun to make. I had hoped to possibly publish it, but in the end, and as has been the case with all my team-requiring projects, it petered out. I needed players to test and give input, and while one friend was very helpful, I needed at least two for a full game. But with kids and church and full-time jobs, it’s hard for anyone to volunteer the amount of time testing would need.

Most of the artwork was stock that I altered. I can get around Photoshop and Illustrator, but I’m not good enough to spit out stuff from scratch. For instance, the above started as a picture of a real skull. The rest are just Illustrator brushes.

The board is made up of individual hexagon tiles that are layed out face-down and semi-random. Tiles would have different gameplay elements on them for adding variability to the game, and as players explore, they flip the tiles. Players start at the center (the bottom of a cave) and then make their way around and up (like the walls of a semi-circular cave). They encounter greater difficulty as they progress, until they finally reach the cave’s exit.

A key element I wanted to implement was interdependence. So, as the players gather resources and take actions, some things increase the player’s own abilities, and some things increase the player’s usefulness to other players. And at the end of the game, not only must all players escape, a single player among them wins based on her individual achievements. Resources can be shared or traded, and some special items a player gathers can only be made use of by other players.

When a player moves to an unflipped tile, he flips it and add its effect. If the tile is a curse tile, a curse adds new obstacles. But the player might also find resources (bamboo, yellow honey, red honey), or he might get stung by a giant bee.

But while I still have all the printables, I’ve lost my instructions! I may have them among my printed testing set. But the following are a sampling of the printables.