Postmortem

Postmortem

In this project, we made a 2-player competitive board game that combines physical action and strategic gameplay together. 

What Went Right

We successfully established a competitive, skill-based play mode, reaching our primary goal. We deem it a success from our own play experience, our observation of playtests and their feedbacks. Our playtesters show their excitement when playing this game. Playtests also help us to “debug” the game and troubleshoot situations which we didn’t anticipate during the design stage through optimization of rules. For example, we found some bugs about ability & punishment cards during the playtest, and refined the rules after that.

Challenges

We also had some challenges during the development of this game. The natural slant of the board makes the corners significantly more likely to be where any given throw of the dice will land. This is likely to encourage the emergence of a definitive strategy. While we worked to combat this by the introduction of larger terrain, without a manufacturing process outside the scope of this project this will remain an obstacle.

What We Learned

During the project, we learned how to simplify rules and make them more playable and understandable for players. During the process we start at a relatively complex rule set with a GM in the game, then we simplify it and cut down unnecessary rules. We learned how to utilize existing elements in the game and simplify rules to a more acceptable level. We also learned to enrich game content by adding more elements and making them coherent with the existing things. We added terrain pieces in our game to enrich late game content and give the game more variety. The shape of terrain can also help players to roll the dice to the positions they want, which is coherent with the rules that we already have.

Next Steps

For next steps, we want to keep developing text cards. Repeated feedback from players indicates that the text card system was a favorite aspect of the game. Working to increase the frequency and interaction of these cards could elevate the gameplay experience. We also want improve the physical board and enrich types of terrain. Given access to a selection of materials and the time to work them a board could be constructed that would give each square equal probability of a dice falling on them.Design and manufacturing of dynamic terrain that would more consistently direct dice towards a square with a card. Multiplayer rules would be another point that we may want to try in the future. We can modify the rules and turn it into a 3 or 4 players game. Surely it will add more fun to it.