Crazy Ideas

Everything starts with a crazy idea. This game is no different. In the end of December of 2016 we traveled to California to see family. It pulls at the heart strings to only see close family a few times a year. To bridge the gap between visits, I enjoy playing tower (td) defense computer games with JN, my brother in law. In December of 2016 as we are spending time with family and playing other board games, I start wondering if it's possible to harness some of that tower defense co-op magic that we enjoy and channel it into a table top game. JN suggests we do a lookup search to see what's already been done.
Christmas day, 2016, I'm sitting around with family and looking up tower defense board games. First stop board game geek, and I notice that almost all tower defense board games there have straight line pathing, that is, the monsters walking in a straight line. This immediately makes most tower defense board games lack a critical challenge, lets call it geometry puzzle. Half the fun of tower defense games is planning out how you want the monsters to run, what maze you'll make, and what towers you will place where (see picture of Sanctum computer game below). Without the ability to change the monster path, I felt like there was something lacking in these games. There was one game that did make an attempt to address the pathing issue, an that game had the users place path tiles as the game progressed. This still was not the same type of geometry puzzle that we really enjoyed from classic td games.
So we set to work figuring out how we could build a board game with better pathing...