Discussion: board game themed in orienteering

ok, just an idea right now, but making one for fun. A board game with a bunch of control locations to reach, rogaine style, with a throw of dice, moving the piece around trying to collect as many controls as possible in a limited number of dice throws. Penalties if surpassing the limit.

chance cards: need your input. Here is a few:

- lost control card at the last control visited.
- hit a wasp nest. lose a turn.
- got tangled in a dark green vegetation. lose a turn.

One of my friends got me the Outdoor Survival game from 1972. You're on a map with different terrains, and you have certain objectives. None of the goals are really orienteering related, but different terrains have different speeds, and you move based on a roll of the die.

Sounds like the dice based war games of the 1970s.
Oh and chance card.
Shite map. Discover unmapped impassable terrain between you and destination. Requires avoiding squares where you want to go.

Ahhh... Outdoor Survival. Its a classic.

"The O Game" - Orienteering Service of Australia, 1981 - has some of these features. The hex board has a number of fixed control locations, which allow setting different courses. Each hex is a different terrain - green forest, yellow open, or blue uncrossable, with trails wandering through some of the hexes, and contours. Each player chooses their orienteering style - runner, navigator, all-rounder, and occasional orienteer. Each turn involves drawing a card that shows the number of hexes that can be moved in each terrain for each style. Some cards bring bad luck, like "You dropped your score card and had to go back. Move back three hexes." This game required making lots of route choice decisions. Our family (three generations of orienteers) still enjoy playing this game. No dice involved. I do not find this game on the Orienteering Service of Australia web site, but hope you can locate it someplace.

The North Gloucestershire Orienteering Club has two orienteering board games, Forest Challenge and urban-O, that they sell and donate the profits to the Woodland Trust in the UK.

- you make a 180, roll dice and move that far in the opposite direction

Rich Dekany of LAOC invented and made the pieces for an orienteering-theme board game that I watched and then played at the Barton Forest Frolic in 2013. It involved a huge number of possible map permutations (classic courses; you could choose the course length in advance; the map changed significantly every game), and a large number of terrain features that you used to navigate to the controls, with several different route choices on each leg. It was sophisticated yet simple. It was really good.

cards saying certain trails can't be used for one or two rounds, e.g., because of use by horses or mountain bikes; bridge over impassable river portion washed out by last heavy rain, out for 3 turns; having to go around a certain area due to birds nesting, for two rounds; if you cross water stop, double the speed for that round; stop this round to have an energy gel of some kind (get a sponsor for printing the board game ;) )and in next round go triple speed (or rolled dice number);
If you can move faster on trails than through other areas, then you could have cards that alter the speed in various areas. There are these train board games, Eurorails, Empire Builder, Nippon Raisl, etc., and varying terrains alter the speed in some way. So in an O game one could have trails and Open where one could move at full speed of number rolled, in light green half speed, and dark green 1/3 speed or something like that; and cards could further alter these speeds.
OK, not sure if this makes ay sense to anyone but me :-/ :)

Dawgtired, how do you generate the map for the board game? I feel like hex tiles drawn out of a bag (similar to Carcassone) is a good idea, but a 15x15 board would be 225 tiles(!).

You could also add elevations to the game by stacking tiles several levels high to make hills.

Been done.