Welcome to Squaretown!
Squaretown is a roll-and-move game played across a patchwork of boards designed by virtual Now Play This visitors. Download a collection of buildings and spaces you like the look of, and connect them together to form a playable town, with players dashing from square to square collecting tokens and completing tasks. If you want to add your own plot to the Squaretown archive, download one of the blank boards, doodle whatever infrastructure you think the town needs, and submit it to our gallery.
To get set up:-
To play the game, you take turns to roll the die and move your pawn that many squares. You can start your move heading in any direction, and when you hit a junction you can choose which way to go. You can’t double back on yourself during a move, and if you hit a dead end, you stop there (even if you had some of your move left).
When you land on stuff at the end of your move, things happen:-
Each board has a crown square. If you end your turn on one and are carrying the tokens it asks you to bring, then you score a point! Drop those tokens into the spares at the side, and score yourself a point on the score sheet. (Note that the crown square is a dead end on all boards, so you won’t always need to painstakingly roll the exact number to land on one.)
As soon as somebody has scored whatever target score you agreed to play to, they win the game.
Help expand Squaretown by drawing a board for our gallery. The first thing is to choose one of the four blank board designs – click on it to get a full-size printable version:-
Then:-
(Note that the way movement works means that dead ends – like the crown squares – are easier to get to than other squares, because you don’t have to roll the exact number to land on them. If you’ve got a useful trading square that you think players might be very keen to visit – like the Charity Shop above – consider putting it at a dead end.)
When you’ve filled in the crown goal, written twelve squares and it’s all looking sufficiently doodly, your board is done! Combine it with some other people’s boards and see how it plays.
—-submission has stopped for now! Thank you for your boards! Hope you enjoyed Squaretown! —-
I only have a black-and-white printer. Is that okay?
Absolutely fine. You can colour the boards in when you’ve printed them.
I don’t have a printer at all. Can I still make a board?
Sure, you’re welcome to draw something freehand and send it in to us: the squares need to be about 2.5 centimetres to a side, and run to the centres of the four sides of the page to join up. Or you can edit a blank board digitally and send it back to us.
How do I print these boards at the right size?
The boards are designed to fill a sheet of A4 paper, you can also print them on letter size paper. You may have to change your printer setting to “fit to page”, “fill page” or “shrink oversized pages”.
One of the squares is confusing. What do we do?
If someone’s written a square that doesn’t quite make sense, discuss it with the other players – when you’ve agreed on an interpretation that you’re all happy with, play it like that. (Make a note on the board if you like.)
We’ve run out of tokens! What now?
Some boards might end up generating lots of tokens. If a square tells you to take a token but there aren’t any left to take, you can either find (or cut out) some more, or just agree that once they’re gone, they’re gone.
Can I change someone else’s board?
Go ahead. Edit the image digitally before printing it, or add squares or doodle on it afterwards, you change anything you like. If you start playing it and find that one is the squares is making things too easy or too silly, pause the game and agree how to change it – when everyone’s happy, resume the game.
What if a game is impossible?
If the game reaches a point where you can see it’s impossible to score any more points – perhaps all the crown squares want plants and animals, but all of the plants and animals have been spent, with no squares producing new ones – then end the game there, with the highest score (if any) winning. Maybe write in a square or two that would stop that from happening again, and start a new game.
Is this game suitable for children?
We’re checking submissions to keep this game child-friendly, but you might want to read the boards first before playing.
I sent you a board, why isn’t it in the gallery?
We might not have processed it yet. We also don’t guarantee that we will upload all boards, for whatever reason.
My board turned up in the gallery with slightly different colours! What happened?
When we process the boards, we may darken a few of the colours to make sure they print well for people who don’t have a colour printer, and may tint some of the grey boards to add some variation.
What else can I make with these boards?
The system being used here is a variant of the snaddering system from Kevan Davis and Viviane Schwarz’s interactive book Board Games To Create And Play, published by Pavilion in 2019. It’s full of blank boards and different rules you can try out on them, from barricades and secret identities to card-based movement and worker placement.