Tobago Board Generator
16 Dec 2020
Tobago is one of my all-time favorite board games. It has 3 board sections which fit together in multiple ways as well as palm trees and huts placed randomly to make a different island map every time.
It’s the “placed randomly” where things get interesting. As humans, it’s hard to do things truly at random - our brains aren’t built for it. I was delighted, therefore, when I came across this little doodad by @TodayIsOkay on BGG. It’s a quite clever JavaScript applet that generates and displays a random Tobago setup. I’ve used it for every game since.
Well, this year the first expansion for Tobago came out, 9 years after the game’s debut. The expansion adds a volcano(!) and lava that covers up parts of the island. The volcano is also placed on the board randomly. So as a challenge to myself, I copied the original code, then modified it to optionally place a volcano. The volcano can either be placed anywhere on the board or in the middle. The keyword here is “copied”: I did not come up with this idea and I would not have known how to implement it. I do, however, know enough to understand it (more or less), and even to expand on it slightly with a little help from a search engine.