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For my Game Design 1 course, the main objective was to obtain experience with designing, prototyping, testing, and evaluating a new game. Since analog games are fairly quick and easy to produce, we began by making card games. This was different from Crates and Ramps in that I needed to design a multiplayer game and find willing testers to play and provide feedback. We were tasked with creating a game in which players must make several meaningful decisions during gameplay in order to succeed and win. My game requires players to make several choices, each with pros and cons to weigh before deciding.
Gamestructor.com was an awesome tool for designing the card layouts. I experimented with leader cards, and would love to revert the game to using them, or produce a secondary version. Sadly, for the scope of the class and the one month time constraint, balancing the leaders proved too heavy a burden.
The game went through a pretty big transformation when I added a new mechanic, but the core play style of trading Volunteer Cards to remove Trash cards never changed. In its current iteration, the first player to remove all 9 Trash cards from their own deck wins.
Players can deploy the Whammy Cards to disrupt their opponents. Careful! Doing so empowers their deck.
My fiance and our friends were happy to help me test the game. In other tests, I recruited players of all ages and backgrounds to gauge the appropriate audience (12-30 years old). Playtesters, even those with little gaming experience, offer invaluable insights into the mechanics and replayability of a game. Most of my original ideas sounded great on paper, but testers pointed out several flaws that needed to be addressed. When it comes to making a game, the more testing between iterations the better.
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