I have been working on this game for awhile now. It's called Perilous Paths. It is inspired by the good ole text based games that you play on a computer. If you have never been lost in a "maze of twisty little passages" then you probably won't get the concept behind this game idea.
Anyway, I'm am trying to simulate how you could actually get lost in a text based maze in my board game. The way I achieve this is by having a player's character piece not visible. Instead of the player being able to see his piece, his opponent does. Think of it like Battleship, except the pieces are reversed. You can see your opponent's piece, but you can't see yours. When you move, your opponent moves your piece and describes the chamber your piece has moved to. As you play the game, you construct your own map on your side, to help you figure out where you are.
I would like to get some suggestions on how enemy spawning can work. In the game, each player controls a dwarf and is trying to escape the maze. In addition, each player can spawn monsters to hamper their opponents process. Should monsters be spawned on the chamber that a dwarf is in? Should monsters be able to move to other chambers? Should a dwarf be able to hear, smell, or sense that their is an enemy in a chamber next to theirs? I am open to any suggestions anyone has.
The Dragon Quest game does sound similar to my idea. However, mine is different. You know how chambers can wrap back around on each other in text based games? That's what my game does. My game really doesn't have a board but it is more tile based. Imagine each chamber as a square tile and each square can have one to four triangles around its sides (the triangles represent passages). Each triangle and square has a number on it, and a triangle connects to the correlating square with the same number. Here would be an example from a game. A dwarf is on chamber 2. There are two triangles connected to this square, north and south. The player tells his opponent that he is moving south. The opponent moves the dwarf onto the south triangle which has the number 5. He then places the dwarf on chamber 5.
One interesting thing about this is that a passage can wrap back around on itself. For example, a player can move and end up in the exact same spot. This can make a player confused because each chamber "looks" the same. Because of this, as a player is mapping out the cave, they can map one chamber as two separate chambers.