Right from the initial inception of the game I had an image in my mind about what the physical part of the game would look like. The first thing that popped into my head was a spiral layout. I guess I thought it would be interesting for a couple of reasons:
- I have to admit that the first thing I thought of was that it reminded me of a sausage coil, danish, dinner place setting etc
- Because it was circular you could place it in the middle of the table and it would be “right side up” to everyone
- Potentially it could be more compact, and so take up less space in the middle of a decorated table (or coffee table)
I did a couple of sketches to figure out how the spaces would be created, whether they were based on equal segment spacing or on a radial segment:
That showed me a couple of things: The problem with radial spacing was that the segments get smaller as you get to the centre, which may be problematic based on the size of the playing pieces, and also it looked a little too much like a dart board.
The next thing I discovered was that it’s really hard to figure out how to draw a spiral so that the spaces between the rings are even:
So eventually I had to basically do it by hand, which wasn’t fantastic, but it gave me a chance to print something out at 11×17 and see whether it makes sense physically. Below is the first  printout I came up with.
It has 7 sequences of 1-6 (The Chef) to make it to the middle, and so one of the interesting things will be to see if that is too long a path / too short etc…
I guess an alternative would be to do a path that’s more of a squared off version, like the sketch shown below:
