Sunda to Sahul: Evolution of the Tile Set

The game started out as an abstract game based on a rhombic tiling that I had been developing over a period of some months in 1998-1999. Originally it used simple rhombic tiles consisting of two coloured triangels with a 1 or a 0 at the centre of each side.

The idea was to make a tiles set that could be assembled in a variety of ways but so that the assembly of the tiles was constrained by the requirement to match the colours and the indices. At some point I replaced the indices by the presence or absence of a spot on the side so that the tiles fitted together like this

The game was based on trying to form trapezoidal regions of one colour like the red region above. The game acquired the name 'zoids as a contraction of trapezoids. You could also form puzzles like the one below, which wasa bonus as far as I was concerned.

The scoring for this game was rather tedious and it was difficult to make the pieces by hand so I modified the pieces and the game a little so that the small polarizing spots on the edge of the tile become a single arc and looked like this.

This made it much easier to make the pieces (with a woodworking gouge to cut the tile edges). Although the game was quite fun it was still tedious to score. After a little experimentation I developed an alternate set of tiles. These pieces were just two colours - a background colour and part of a spot that might or might not be present on each 'corner' of the tile. The pieces in the picture below contain a spot on only one 'corner' but the full set had spots on up to 4 corners. The basic idea here was to have a game a little like Go but with the board itself being constructed as part of the game play and forming part of the strategic element of the game. The underlying concept of the game was to make complete spots, and the counting was achieved by using coloured counters to claim a complete spot.

It was about this point (in early 2000) that I decided it might be worthwhile turning this into a commercial game. As I am an enthusiastic German board game player and thought this game could be turned into something of interest to that community, I decided to develop the abstract game into a themed game. The first attempt was a game which I called Andamooka, in which each of the spots were Opal mines and players staked a claim on a mine if they managed to make a complete spot by placing one of their opals on the spot.

This is an early prototype for Andamooka.

The problem with this was that the pieces tended to move around as people played, so I hit on the idea of making the pieces interlock in some way. The first attempt at shapes looked something like

After some evolution I came up with the current shapes. But when it came to putting together artwork, I found I had difficulty illustrating the tiles so that scale relativities were acceptable, while still honoring the theme (Andamooka is in the middle of the desert in South Australia).

At the time I was reading a book by Jared Diamond called "Guns Germs and Steel" and I was also working on some ideas for the synthesis of image textures. Somehow these things gelled together into the idea that I could turn the pattern of spots on the tiles into a pattern of island and base the game on the migration of people down the Indonesian archipelago into Australia and the basis of Sunda to Sahul was born.

The evolution of the game itself took another year. Getting it to a marketable product is another story altogether.