Designing and Playtesting

On Wednesday we had another Ludology class where we had some new constraints in the boardgames we were designing. One of which was that the game required at least 3 players which is a great way to change things up, for me it was a challenge compared to last week but eventually I came up with an idea that allowed for a scalable number of players. I had never considered this as a major factor but in fact the number of players has a big effect on the design of the game. For digital games I think it's an important to criteria to establish early in the process as certain games suit certain player numbers and the number of players will, I imagine, affect development time.

The game I made was called Around the World and it involved moving your piece around a circular board in order to get to the end of the game. A given card was required to move to the next tile and there were two special cards. In the playtest I think I had the card quantities completely wrong and a few rules needed tuning, the special cards were far too common and had abilities that required a very specific and rare set of events to be of use. As a group we decided not to develop my game and I think that was the right decision as Owens elemental card game has a lot of potential for a unique game. If I was to develop my game further it would be aimed at families using simple interactions and a more balanced deck. For now however I think I can do better so I'll not dwell on it.


The other games in the group were the elemental card game which we all felt had a lot of potential and decided to develop further. There was a cool game about flicking a ball over a ramp and into a ring which was good fun and very different to the standard boardgame. The final game was a cool mix of board/card game with some player embarrassment elements which was a cool way to implement some metagame features and was entertaining.

I think we'll be doing some puzzle stuff next week which I'm looking forward to as I wouldn't be very familiar with puzzles.