Treasure Looters
Role: Rule Designer, Card Designer
Overview:
The Game is based on the concepts of CandyLand, but with a new feature of of Rewards & Punishments added to the game. The goal of the game is for players to race to the end and make it back in one piece before the others. This was a challenge since we needed to find a way in balancing the game's Risk vs. Rewards.
What I did:
Created a Rule Documentation and adjusted the features for better game balance.
Helped out by mapping out the board concepts for the Rewards & Trap features in the game.
Postmortem
Even though our game has meet all the criteria of a race to the end board game, there were parts that we could've made improvements. We manage to incorporate a lot of the racing concepts in the game and had built it to make the game play more basic for 8 year old's to play the board game. Our key features was the use of the Risk vs. Rewards concepts while adding player interactions in the mix. Each of our team members had a more active part in building the board game such as the rule designer, artwork concepts of the game, the board's basic layout, and the Card productions. Most of our work was a bit time constricting, but we manage to pull through until the end.
Our best improvements so far with the game was the game balance throughout the game play. Other things that went well was our basic rule sheet being narrowed down to a double-sided page, easily readable and understandable. And our last thing we thought was good was the use of the art concepts on the board game, giving it a bit more of an Aztec theme with the symbols that matches with the games theme.
Though we manage to supply our board game with a lot towards the needed criteria, there were some things that we need to improve on. Our first one was the lack of player interactions, where there weren't enough cards to make players interfere with others progress. There was also the issue with our cards not having the background feature, which would confuse players in regards to which card is which. The part that needs to be clarified the most was the certain lack of interest of our game where it had a plain design with no creativity and doesn't seem to have too much of a value to put out that attracts attention.
This final outlook of our game brings a lot of attention to what we need to do and what we've learned from all of this, and that is to create an entertainment value to what a board game holds. When running the basic with the basics of a racing game, we've learned that rules need to be more simple and straight to the point rather than handing the players a full 3-4 page booklet of the game. If there is one thing that I learned from all of this, that is to communicate with other players regarding their status on their parts of the game; sometimes we all need someone to criticize our work before play testing, that way we can change the aspects of our work to the point it become perfected.
Even though our board game didn't get any votes, this was something to learn from all of this. If you know the board game needs further improvements, don't be afraid to speak you mind and start implementing the changes that’s best for the game.