We finally have… something.

This Wednesday we spent yet another day in brainstorming agony, we had really tried to make the “angry old lady-game” work. We spent almost two whole workdays trying to bring life to this broken corpse of a system, it was time to move on.

Starting fresh left us very stressed, we needed a prototype finished for the next day at 13:00, yet we didn’t have a working game idea. So, once again, we went back to brainstorming. After a while Philip came up with this mafia concept, Björn with that as inspiration started to create a prototype where you needed to bluff how many men you had in order to claim territories. They cut out material for the prototype and started testing, we now did have a working game, but it had a problem. The game was more of a strategy game than anything else; it didn’t really have our aesthetics at its core. In order to gain advantage you could bluff, but the game wasn’t focused on it. We were so tempted to go with this game, it was really late and we were all frustrated and tired, but we couldn’t… We knew that we rather would suffer through another brainstorm in order to get something more simple and true to our aesthetics.

I tried to remove the old lady from the old lady game, since that was the main entity that broke the game. So I thought it would be cool to have a survival scenario instead, a little “lord of the flies-feeling” to it. I got some inspiration from a scene in lord of the rings; I wanted the players to feel like Gollum where he blames Sam for stealing food.

So we started talking about games where you needed to steal food from the group to win, food cards were the goal and at the same time something that you didn’t want to get caught with. We discussed the idea and concluded that it would be as hard to make it work as the old lady game.

At 19:00 we had lost almost all our sanity and focus, before we left we said that we would do something really simple that we could make a prototype out of before 13:00 the next morning. We decided that players would start with five cards and that players would have their own piles where they would try to put goal cards (or “food cards”) without anyone taking the risk of calling their bluff. For that to work we needed “junk cards” which players could in their pile making others think that it was food.

So that was the setup, we decided that we would meet at 10:00 on the Thursday to make a prototype out of it.

So the next day we all met up and got to work, cutting out cards with numbers on them (1-10). There were finally 20 cards in the deck, so the deck contained of pairs, we could just as well have used a memory card game. The difference we added was the “junk cards” as previously mentioned. We added 10 junk cards to the deck, the junk cards served as “blanks”, and you needed to bluff in order to get rid of them. We had decided early that you would win when you didn’t have any cards left, it would make the game simpler, containing less components.

As we did that I came up with the idea. We had talked before about events on the table with conditions that the players would have to meet. So I thought that we could try to place some cards on the table face up, since there were only two cards with the same number, you would place your card below a “nr.6” for example, claiming that you have the other nr.6.

Now another player could be sitting with the real nr.6 or maybe they just don’t believe that you have it. Then they would be able to call your bluff, but in order to do that they would have to put a card of their own below yours, claiming that they had the real nr.6. The first player would now have to show his/her card, if it actually was a nr.6, the one who called it would have to pick up two cards, if the first player had bluffed, the first player would have to do the same.

Note: The player who calls the bluff can also bluff, saying that he/she has the real nr.6; it would be up to another player to call this bluff if they wanted to. If no one does call your bluff for a full round around the table, your bluff succeeds and the cards in that line gets thrown into the discard pile, without anyone knowing if you bluffed or not.

So we tried many different variations of this system, with and without “junk cards”, with different amounts of players and cards on the table. We finally decided that the game was best played with four players, four cards on the table and with junk cards.

For the first time we actually had something that both worked, required you to bluff and was fun! We still need to add opportunities for players to frame and blame each other though, but at least now we had something we could have other people test.

During the prototype testing people played it and experienced it the way we intended them to, we discovered that it still was a bit broken. People’s bluffs often got revealed because of new cards being put on the table and people won with junk cards, which wasn’t our intention. But overall it was a success, especially when you think of how fast we had to create it. Now we have something to work on, a solid ground for once, I’m looking forward to making a real game out of it.