This blog serves as a place to talk about my experiences playing new-to-me videogames and hanging out in SecondLife. It might encourage others to try playing games and spending time in virtual worlds.
This semester in Critical Analysis of Games, we had about 12 or 13 games out of a class of 26. Some folks worked alone because of their schedules or because they were the only person interested in a topic. Here is a link to all the projects for this class: projects. You can see more pictures here on Flickr.
There were games about LOLcats, YouTube videos, space pirates, Dante's Inferno, Dr. Horrible's musical blog, greek mythology, dating in the 50s, retro space adventuring, trans-Canadian highway system, children's fairy tales, and bounty hunting. We had board games, trivia games, card games, and combinations. The play test session was hectic. We rotated games in and out as people finished a round. It would be better to let them play a round, have a few minutes to make notes, and then repeat. For that we need space and people - lots of people - since most of the games need 4 players.
We invited some staff and other professors to come play. They gave the students good feedback. It was a way for other people in the school to see what kinds of things students in the new game design major will do. And it's important for students to get feedback from someone other than me (or their peers). Especially if we want to think about making commercially viable games - we need to understand different markets
Having our playtest time during final exams week makes it tough to get students. Next year we're going to do the big play test the last week of classes. That will give the students more time to revise and do their write up too. This year we had candidates in doing demo classes so we were a little short of time.
I've decided to make it more of a straight card game, no board.
There are ride/exhibit cards that tell you how much whuffie (respect) you need to update, what skills you need to have to update, and how much whuffie you get each round just for controlling it.
There are skill cards - painting, animating, robotics, etc. Some rides (E ticket rides maybe) take more than one skill to update and extra whuffie because people don't want you to mess withe classic rides. It might be interesting to let people spend whuffie to buy a specific skill.
Whuffie is in the form of chips - I'm thinking each player has a different color so you could watch your respect move from player to player. You get a stash of whuffie at the beginning of the game. You get whuffie each round for the rides you control. It costs you whuffie to rehab/update a ride. Once you update a ride it might be worth more whuffie (like putting a hotel on a property in Monopoly - still thinking about that.
When you have the whuffie and skills you can update a ride that you control. You have to update a number of rides to cause the end of the game - I'm thinking one in each land of the Magic Kingdom but that might take too long. There are 6 lands - so maybe gotta rehab rides in 4 of the 6 lands.
The winner is whoever has the most whuffie wins (assuming that the more rides you update, the more whuffie you will have).
There will be unexpected event/wild cards - sometimes you lose a turn, sometimes you get to take their whuffie or take over a wide they've put out to control
downloading the character's memories for safe keeping (since you can get cloned/reborn pretty easily) - lose a turn
get shot/killed and have to be cloned - lose a turn
accident on one of your rides -you have to give up a chunk of whuffie
your best friend starts dating your significant other - lose a turn
I'm playing with the idea of cooperation - so if 2 people had the Space Mountain card, they could share ownership of it and pool their resources to rehab it (and split the whuffie that ya get for hte rehab. Cooperation would be even cooler if players were eliminated one by one - players could cooperate to gang up on another player. Not sure of the benefit of cooperation if it's a winner take all game.
Right now I think everybody will be dealt a small number of cards to start - say 5. They will get a stash of whuffie chips. They can claim a ride by laying the card down in front of them and putting up some whuffie as collateral that they will treat the ride with respect. Each round you can rehab a ride, draw a card, play a wild card, buy a skill - do one of those things. Each round you get a new stash of whuffie. If you decide to rehab a ride you have to lay down your skills and take the right amount of whuffie out of your stash and put a marker on the map of the kingdom (hmmm - forgot to mention there's a map didn't I ? Well there's a big general map with the areas marked out like frontier land and fantasy land)
Lands & Rides (in order from the main gate to the left on the map except for toontown fair which isn't part of the classic Disney Magic Kingdom that I grew up with)
Main Street USA 4- railroad, horse drawn jitney, double decker bus, parade - all A tix so easy one to start with
Adventureland 4 - treehouse - B, enchanted tiki room - E, jungle cruise - B, pirates - E
Frontierland 4 - tom sawyer island, country bear jamboree - E, splash mountain, big thunder mountain
Liberty Square 3 - hall of presidents, riverboat - D, haunted mansion - E
Fantasyland 5 - it's a small world - E, peter pan's flight - C, show white's scary adventures - C, dumbo - C, carousel - A
Tomorrowland 5 - speedway, space mountain - E, wedway people mover - D, carousel of progress, astro orbiter - D
Boardgame News has a good post this week about bhilding prototypes of boardgames. It doesn't go into game mechanics or creating ideas. Instead it looks at the importance of having lots of bits and pieces around to work with - cards, money, markers, dice. The author talks about using existing cards (playing cards, Magic the Gathering cards) and pasting new game stuff on the card front - the cards all have uniform card backs. He keeps around old games that he doesn't want to play anymore and uses the money, cards, small wooden pieces. I guess you could even use the board - just cover it with a new graphic. He even has a home laminator.
It's a timely article because the students in my critical analysis of games class (2nd semester of the freshman year of our game design major) are finishing up creating games with the Icehouyse game system pyramids. After spring break they start work on creating a board game. This article suggests stuff I need to collect for this semester and the future. I saw tons of gorgeous paper at AC Moore. They even have die cutters with premade dies that I need to look at - we could make cool specialty/themed shapes with it.
See an earlier post about our playtesting the pyramid games. I will post about playtesting the board games at the end of the semester and have some more ideas about what we should be colecting.
I've noticed some of these same qualities in my college students. Specifically - they don't want to read rules to learn new games. They see games like Colossal Arena and Race for the Galaxy are too complex, have too many pieces, take too long to set up. And some of them do take a while to learn or to set up - but the games seem worth the effort with good game play and different ways to win.
IImage by kgregson via Flickr bought some more game for the game design program - mostly card games because they have some interesting gameplay mechanics and rules. And remember I've said you can make a game about anything - check out these topics - zombies, sushi, sammich making, bean farming, school politics, medieval politics.... And I bought most of them locally (in Binghamton) at Jupiter Games. Here's a link to their website and to a yelp page with a map. The store has game nights on Friday that would be worth going to. They regularly attract about 30 players. They have a big collection of games open to play. And people seemed open to teaching games to newbies (for folks from Intro to Games & Society - they have Race to the Galaxy and know how to play it! And like playing it!!!)
Image from Coloretto via WikipediaHere's what I bought over break.
Wasabi (card game - make sushi by Joshua Cappel and Adam Gertzbein)
Image via WikipediaI bought 5 new card games for the games classes - different game play mechanisms, some interesting themes, some 2 player and some 3-5 player, some by well-known designers We got Pink Godzilla Dev Kit Frog Juice Slamwich MMM...Brains and Monkeys on the Moon
And after reading some game play reports from the big board game geek conference in Texas here are a few more games I want to buy. Amazon doesn't carry them and funagain games doesn't have a persistent shopping cart so I'm going to put the info here till I"m ready to buy some more games
Eselsrennen - you race donkeys Wasabi - a tile layiing game wher eyou're trying to build sushi Cities - a tile laying game, can be played in about 20 minutes, builds on ideas (and meeples) in Carcasonne Coloretto (tho the new game by the same designer Boss Kito is supposedly not good at all) Code 777 - a dice game Gulo Gulo - a kid's game about removing eggs froma bowl
My goal was to play games or watch videos every Friday in the Intro to Games & Society. Out of 9 weeks tho we have only managed 3 play days. We had a movie, a guest speaker, an exam review. Can't figure out where the other weeks went.
Anyway - we started our 2nd round of game play. Each group got assigned a new game to learn. Hopefully as we go thru more games groups will begin to share tips about how to play.
So far Apples to Apples seems to be the game most people know already and so have the most fun playing. Carcassone and Ticket to Ride are totally unknown but the groups pick them up pretty quickly and manage to get almost all the way thru a game the very first day. Race for the Galaxy is kicking our butts - the phases are confusing and the symbols on the cards often undecipherable.
Image via WikipediaToday we played board and card games in the Introduction to Games & Society class. I divided the students up into 10 groups of 3. Each group was assigned a game to play. We'll play each game for 2 weeks and then rotate to a new game. I gave each student a booklet with copies of the rules for 12 games. Hopefully over the semester we can get most of those 12 played by at least half the class.
The goal is to experience a lot of different game mechanics, different styles of writing rules and balancing the games. Game designers need to be mroe aware of how people learn to play how much people hate to read the rules, and how they try to compare new games with what they know already. They'll also see games from different publishers, different game creators, even different countries. We have some party games. We have some Euro games. Hopefully after they play a few games they will start to see similarities and we can discuss why the differences exist.
This is part of a bigger assignment where they have to learn games, teach them to other people and compare the games. So playing, teaching, writing, researching, and thinking.
Here's the game we played today: Carcassone, Ticket to Ride (board) Ticket to Ride (card), Amazing Space Venture, Colossal Arena, Apples to Apples, Nuclear Escalation, and Race for the Galaxy. 2 groups went together to play Apples to Apples and 2 others to play Nuclear Escalation - both of those games support larger groups. I'd seen all of these played at the Boardgame Championships in Lancaster, PA during the summer 2008, but I'm not expert at any of them.
They weren't all equally liked at least at first exposure. Race for the Galaxy is hard to get started playing. Amazing Space Venture has a lot of pieces which can be intimidating for new users.
Here are some pictures. We're all sprawled on the floor. We found tables for the 2 large groups. The noise level wasn't too bad fortunately.
We invited some staff and other professors to come play. They gave the students good feedback. It was a way for other people in the school to see what kinds of things students in the new game design major will do. And it's important for students to get feedback from someone other than me (or their peers). Especially if we want to think about making commercially viable games - we need to understand different markets
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