A while back, Victoria had the idea to turn one of her favourite book series - Warriors, a series I've also come to enjoy - into a board game. Given my current obsession with board games, I started working on it too, and it has become a fun little experiment for the both of us.

The concept is to turn the Warrior Cats series into a strategy game, where you compete to have the strongest clan of cats in the forest. We're doing this for ourselves - if by some miracle our first board game ends up being half-decent we might apply for the licence, but otherwise we won't be selling this to anyone.

The Warriors Books

To understand our vision, you have to understand the book series. Warriors is a decades-old book series that pretends to target children, but is perfectly suited to that "animal-obsessed neurodivergent person" niche. I'd describe it as drama/action/fantasy - in that order, it's practically a soap, but with a generous amount of prophecies, chosen one tropes and fairly gory battles considering the target demographic.

Overview

The series focuses on a forest filled with a handful of clans of cats - your typical Hogwarts House deal, where each clan has different strengths and weaknesses. Mostly, the action focuses on Thunderclan. The clans have their own territories where they hunt and gather separately, but they come together for gatherings and special events. The clans have their own politics and often break out into inter-clan battles, but the "Warrior Code" mostly prevents all-out war.

The Warrior Code - enforced by Starclan, the mysterious and powerful ancestors in the sky - encourages peace between clans by defining the rules for everything from where you're allowed to hunt (in your own territory), to how to conduct ceremonies, to who is allowed to fall in love (inter-clan romances and romances with medicine cats are forbidden). Of course, all rules were made to be broken, and this is the source of most of our drama, on top of constant threats from humans ("two-legs"), animal outsiders, and the environment itself.

Inside a clan

A clan comprises:

• a clan leader - like Bluestar - bestowed with 9 lives from Starclan
• a deputy - assigned by the leader to manage hunting patrols and border patrols
• a medicine cat - chosen and mentored by the previous medicine cat, they use various herbs and things to heal cats and are also the clan's spiritual leader, able to speak with Starclan in their dreams to receive advice and prophetic visions
• warriors - the majority of adult cats, in charge of hunting and patrolling
• apprentices - warriors-in-training, a mentor teaches them exciting and varied fighting and hunting techniques
• elders - old or injured cats, they can still provide assistance in the form of advice or as a last line of defence if the camp is invaded.
• queens and kits - the next generation are nursed and protected in the nursery.

Our vision

Pillars

I've decided to loop you in at a very early stage in the design, so things are very much in flux. Who knows if we'll even get a viable prototype? That said, we have identified a few pillars that we think would make it a great game:

• The focus for the player should be on managing the clan as a whole, but with the potential to tell great stories.
• Victory conditions will require balancing the needs of your own clan -represented by a "strength" track - with the needs of other clans and a few narrative-based events - represented by a "Starclan's Favour" track.
• Much of the tension will come from food scarcity. When your food is plentiful, will you share it with other clans or save it for a rainy day? When food is running dangerously low, will you encroach on opponents' territory and risk starting a fight?
• Combat between players will be possible, but the game will strongly encourage an "uneasy peace". In fact, a rule we established early on is that if any opponent becomes too weak or is outright eliminated, everybody loses! We feel that strongly adhering to the theme here will create a unique and interesting game that "feels" like the Warriors series.

Mechanics

We've made a few super-early prototypes, but have struggled to lock down a set of mechanisms we like. We've tried point-to-point movement, area movement, tableau building, worker placement, and more. Our focus at the moment is trying a few more of these combinations, to narrow down our options a bit further.

Inspirations

Here are some of the games that are inspiring as currently, many of them also favourites of ours:

• Scythe - We love the use of tension over aggression, as well as many of the other mechanics
• Champions of Midgard - we love the worker-placement system, and have also tested using a similar combat mechanic
• Apiary - we love the fact that workers could be upgraded, and initially we wanted to be able to show apprentices upgrading to warriors
• Root - we love the overall vibe of this "cute animal wargame".
• Wingspan - probably our most-played game, we love tableau builders, and we looked at incorporating a tableau so that each warrior could have unique abilities and identities rather than being simple meeples.
• Ark Nova - we love the combination of mechanics, and lately we've been enjoying heavier games, so many of our prototypes employ a similar design of "a few great board game mechanics interconnected in cool ways".
• Star Wars: Rebellion - one of my favourite games currently, we love the overlapping time and reputation tracks, and we're currently considering using area movement.

Many of our sketches/prototypes look very similar to some of these games (currently it looks a bit like a cross between Scythe and Root), but the idea is slowly starting to get its own DNA. The overall vibe is a bit different to all of them, so we want the mechanics to be different as well, or at least combine elements of all of them.

Next Steps

We're still in the early concept and prototyping stage. We've returned to brainstorming multiple times already. Once we've created a prototype that feels close enough, then we can start iterating and refining a bit more.