Board Game, Works with Lynn
The game we're going to change the mechanics is Klotski (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klotski), which there's a Chinese version named Huarong Dao (华容道), which has the Three-Kingdom history story background.
Klotski and Huarong Dao
After the discussion, we think the board and the blocks would remain in the game, but players cannot move one block at this time; in the opposite, they need to make all blocks move into one direction. In our desired final version, players would slide the board in one direction and make all blocks going down with gravity.
But as the game objective is still not changed (moving the big block from one side to another), sliding boards may make it impossible to solve the problem. To solve this, we suggest adding some barriers between two block tiles on the board to get some blocks stuck when moving in certain directions. For example in the figure below, when sliding the board to the right, one block is blocked by the red line barrier. Players can then slide upwards to exchange the order of two blocks.
Furthermore, we think these barriers can be set by players before the game (and we can design some basic types). This may increase the difficulty and replayability. Also, we think the original board may be too small (4x5) for our new game. So we temporarily set the new size as 8x8. Considering the 1x1-size block should be big enough to let players put or use, we set 1-unit reflects 3 cm, and the board size is 24x24 cm.
Blocks have three types: King (2x2 units), General (1x2 or 2x1 units), and Soldiers (1x1 units). The specific number for each type is not decided yet, and we decide to make the first prototype with hard paper boards to test it.
First, we set up the first paper prototype. Bricks used the traditional Klotski brick layout. We gave players some 1x1 blocks or 2x1 blocks to let them choose where to put the blocks. However, no one passed the level. One player thought the block is unnecessary because he tried the best and found he cannot even solve the problem. We think this may be because of the traditional layout - using other numbers of bricks and layouts may solve the problem.
Another player thought maybe we should have a different exit at each side, not just at the bottom. This may worth considering, but as our mechanics allow players to slide and rotate the board, where to place the exit has no difference.
Another thought is the blocks - We allowed players to place the blocks freely, but we found this may lead to unsolvable results. So using static block settings would be our choice.