Tetris – the board game

By: Marcus van Aller / October 05, 2014 /

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In an assignment to redesign a real time digital game into a board game in a day, our group decided on Tetris.
Some changes needed to made to fully adapt the experience of Tetris into a board game. It is for example not possible to in a good way remove full lines and move down the above blocks, therefor we decided that they would stack and the score was determined by the amount of filled lines they had in the end. To compensate we added a multiplier for every 4 in a row giving them twice the points for those rows.
We also put in a timer which determined how fast they would need to place a block, generally we did that through a person counting down from 3 as we found 3 to be the optimal number of seconds, if the person failed to place a block before the time ran out, they had to place it in the middle.

We met a few design issues at first when we used paper as the game would just become frustrating due to how easily the paper could just glide out of position. Team members however decided to ask for cardboard boxes which we were then given and were able to cut up and glue the papers to. This made the blocks a lot harder to move accidentally and easier to pick up which in general saved the experience of the game.

All in all, it was a successful creation and people who played it really did feel like they played Tetris. We made some changes on the go due to feedback like allowing for a pause function to correct the placing of the cards (as they could still start to get scrambled) which made our game quickly become a lot better by the time it was reviewed.

Filed under: Game analysis and game design – introduction – 5SD018, University Tagged: 5SD018