Vuur Water Boom is a board game in which 2 players battle against each other using three different elements. Players have to try to guess which elements hide under the pieces of their opponents and use their cards to their best advantage.
The game is a mix of rock paper scissors and stratego, but uses cards to allow for more diverse game actions. The goal is to take out all of the pieces of the other player (with water defeating fire, fire defeating tree and tree defeating water). The core of the game is found within the actions on the cards, which can allow players to obtain information by getting to look at one of the pieces of their opponent or to create uncertainty by allowing them to swap their own pieces around (or by pretending to do so!) This allows for some fun games, where players try to bluff and confuse each other.
While designing this game I wasn't sure if I wanted the player to be able to move every turn as a free action or if I should include the movement in the cards. After testing I decided to have the movement be an action on the cards. Otherwise players would be able to use a special card action, like swapping pieces around, every single turn and I felt like that was too chaotic. After the change, a lot of the cards just had "move x spaces" on them, which in return made cards with special actions on them feel more special as well.
I also made a digital game called Vuur Water Boom.
I liked the idea of the three elements as a similar alternative to a rock paper scissors system and while this game is not very similar to the board game, it does borrow elements from it (I wasn't planning on making this pun it just kind of happened).
In this singleplayer game the player can swap the three elements around. The goal is to line them up correctly against the opposing elements that are heading towards the bottom of the screen.
To make it more difficult, a cloud sometimes obscures one of the elements heading down the screen. This forces the player to think quickly and deduce which element is missing. This seems easy, but as the game goes on the board grows wider and the player is confronted with additional instances of water, fire or trees to stop and control.