The board game project
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It all began when our group decided over Skype that we should meet last Sunday (2013-10-13). During this first meeting, if one could even call it that. It was more of a brainstorming session where we tried to figure out what the player should feel when playing our game, the aesthetic and some other factors like how fast it would be to play, if it should be complex, etc. The criterias the game should meet were:
The aesthetics that we decided for:
So when we later came up with ideas we tested them against the bullet points above, and if it fell short we dumped the idea. We did this for an hour, discussing different ideas back and forth without reaching any consensus. We then realized that perhaps we were too picky and should try to keep ideas and work with them, even though they did not meet all criteria. One idea was to try and make a board game adaptation of the Warcraft III mod Footmen Frenzy. I liked that as it is one of the better mods out there that simulates snowballing, and I was up for the challenge, although it would not be that simple to play, that is at least what i imagined. A lot of cards or markers that represents soldiers would be a necessity, unless the army management was heavily abstracted, but that would probably remove a lot of the feel the original game has, as it is mostly about fighting and moving with units. In the end, the only things that were set in stone after the Sunday meeting were the few bullet points. The next few meetups we just tried to figure out a game that was not broken with the aesthetics we wanted to give it. Many different ideas were thrown around, but only three were tested as paper prototypes, so I’m going to try and explain them below. The first one was about four little kids and an angry old lady that the kids would try to prank. Kids were supposed to play prank cards when the old lady was “sleeping” and then when she woke up she would find out what pranks happened to her. The old lady would then try to figure out which brat did what prank. We quickly realized it was just a guessing game as there was no mechanic that helped the granny to figure which prankster did what prank. When we added means for the old lady to figure things out, it just felt like the a game about probability theory and the player who played the old lady took so long to figure things out that the four people who played the pranksters became bored. This was when we decided to scrap the idea and go for the next one. The second idea tried to adopt the idea with footmen frenzy where players try to overwhelm the opponent with units and snowball from there. Four players would play this game, and they started with three cards that had five soldiers on them each and two blank cards that could be used to feign the opponents, because the big twist with this game was that you could not see what units each player was moving, only that things were moving. The players started in each corner of a square board that had 25 tiles. Each corner had the troop cards of the respective player on them, upside down. During a turn the player could move troops to an empty tile, to take it over, he could for example move a blank card from his starting tile onto a tile next to the starting tile, moving cards diagonally was not allowed. When a player moved cards from a tile onto a tile which was already occupied by another player, the player occupying could choose to fight against the intruder or just retreat to a tile where he had units. If the player already holding the tile chose to fight, he would turn his cards revealing the number of troops, same for the attacker. If the attacker had ten troops and the defender five, each player would have to discard five troops, meaning the defender lost control of the tile. Each player gets money at the start of their turn that they can spend on more troops (and if we had continued to iterate, probably items and upgrades too). Having more tiles gives that player more money per turn. The reason there are blank cards is to fool the other players, so a player could bluff an entire army, and the others might be too scared to attack a tile that has a huge pile of cards on them. We scrapped this idea because it became too cluttered and overly complex. The third and final idea that we made a paper prototype of was about bluffing and only used a small deck of cards. The deck has two cards of each value from 1 – 10 and ten extra cards that have an x on them. The game is played with four players. At the start of the game four cards are taken from the deck and put on the table, then each player gets three cards from the deck each and put them on their hand. The goal is to get rid of all the cards on the hand. Each player plays a card on their turn. They put a marker on the card the played, this is important for later. When a player plays a card they announce what card they played, but it on the table upside down below one of the four cards already on the table. So if there is a five on the table a player may then announce that he is playing a five and put it below the five already on the table. The player that played the five could have played any card, but only the player that played knows what it actually is. When the next player plays, he may play a card below a card with the upside up or play a card below the card the previous player said was a five to call his bluff. If it turns out that player bluffed he must pick up two cards from the deck, if it however turns out it actually was a five, the player that called the bluff has to pick up two cards. If it was a bluff only the card that was not a five is discarded, it it was not a bluff, both fives are discarded into the discard pile and a new card is put on the table so there are always four cards on the table. If an entire turn passes and no one calls the bluff for that player he must remove the marker and discard the two cards (the one with the upside up and the other with the upside down). A new card is put on the table to make sure there are always four cards with the upside up on it. If an x is on the table it can only be removed by a player putting an x with the upside up below it, putting those two cards in the discard pile and a new card on the table. The game continues until someone goes an entire turn without a card on his hand, if that happens, that player wins. Hopefully that helps you understand the games somewhat. What I got best at during these days was folding and tearing A4 papers into nice symmetric cards, because we lacked scissors! |
