Designing a Board Game from Playground Games

Our next task was to think about the experiences during our playground games and select a characteristic that we think had the greatest impact during play. We were grouped in teams, we chose to work on Cooperation.

We built a mind map of what can affect cooperation and focused on the player experience while reverse engineering the game to accommodate that.

Coop:

• Interaction – get to know others

• Environment – different terrain changes game play and team work

• Role Play – take the role of a character

• Strategy – be smarter then your opponent

• Team work – helping others and get helped

• Skills – use team player different skills in your team’s advantage

As base model, we decided to work on Freeze. The game would consist of two teams, hunters and prays. At first, we were thinking of having the Pray having to cross a boarder and get into the safe zone. But on a board game it is almost impossible to achieve so because the hunters will create a line a block all of the way. An option would be to reduce the number of hunters in order to give chance to the pray to cross but it would reduce strategy from the pray side.

Then we kept on thinking and came out with another idea, there would be a safe zone on a side of the boar and a prison on the other side. The players will spawn opposite of each other in the middle and that there would be more pray then hunters, or as we were now calling them, predators.

At this point we started to break down rules and question some things that would affect the game like: how big is the board, how many steps can a pray or hunter move? Is there strategy involved? Is it playable?

Rules:

• There are 5 predators and 8 pray.

• The board is 17x10 units excluding safe zone and prison.

• Players are position at the far top and bottom of the board horizontally.

• Predators are placed skipping a space between each other.

• Pray leave the middle space empty.

• Predators must capture all pray in order to win.

• Pray must get all to the safe zone to win.

• If a predator steps on a pray, the pray is made prisoner, and immediately transported to prison.

• If a pray manages to arrive to the prison, the pray is able to realise the other imprisoned pray.

• All characters could move in all directions.

• All characters can move at the same turn.

• Pray have maximum total number of moves caped to 20.

• Predators have maximum total number of moves caped to 10.

• Each character is limited to 5 moves only per turn.

Then we built a model of the game to have a better visualisation of what is happening while testing the game.

Pray are the Green while Predators are the Orange characters.

As we were testing the game it was still very hard to get all the pray to the safe zone while avoiding predators and saving prisoners. So, we added a hat.

The hat would be used to support pray. If a pray manages to wear the helmet he is able to permanently eliminate the pray. If the pray wearing the hat is eliminated the hat would fall where the pray was arrested. That was the total progress we managed to achieve during one lesson. The next lesson things shifted again and we had to create a hybrid game.