Category: Game Design Studio 1

Review:

In week 4, we first played Nanobots. I got a very thorough understanding of this game and I really enjoyed it. It was fairly easy to learn and understand. Each turn was justified by the action card and the players strategy. I feel like this was a game of chance but also a game of strategy. Even if the player had a great strategy, the action cards picked by their opponents could easily kill them. As for the other game, we didn’t have time to thoroughly play the game, but from what we did get to do, it was very confusing. I was not a big fan of this game. There was a very long list of rules that didn’t really make sense.

5 Building Games:

1. Train
   In this game, you will build a train to travel across the world. The cards you pick will gain you money, parts, or passengers. The bigger your train gets, the more protection and supplies you will need.
   If you do not have the required parts for the amount of passengers, your passengers will die. You have to save as many people as possible.
2. Blocks
   There will be blocks of different sizes and colors. You will pick up a card telling you what block to pick up. You must strategically build your tower as high as possible without it falling. Once a block is placed it cannot be moved. Whoever has the highest tower wins.
3. Duck Crossing
   Each player will have 4 ducks. Each duck has a character card that tells you their needs. You must gain money and supplies to build a river for the ducks to swim in. If you do not fulfill the needs of a duck, they die. Whoever saves the most ducks wins.
4. Office Building
   Players will pick a card with a company on it and their requirements. Players will pick cards giving them supplies and/or money. Using these, they will have to build an office building for their company. You must fulfill all of the needs of your company to win.
5. Color Match
   Each player will pick two colors (RGBY). They will have 30 tokens per each color. Players lay one token per turn. The goal is to get three of the same color in a row before the other player disrupts it. Once all of the tokens run out, the player with the most matches wins.

Review:

• NanoBots was fun, however it ruined our friendships as we kept attacking each other. I liked the idea, but a board with a grid would have made it easier to tell who was adjacent to one another. Cascassonne we did not really understand very much. I liked building the board, the “kingdom,” and connecting the pieces, but we did not really figure out the point of the characters.

Building Game Ideas

• Balloon Pop
• Getting Promoted
• Build a skyscraper
• Make a meal?

Week 1:

• Flux started out slow as we first started playing, but once we figured out the rules the game got more interesting and fun. Love letters was the same way, but we caught on more quickly because there were less cards and it was the same concept as the last game with the changing rules. Hanabi was difficult because we couldn’t look at our cards. It was confusing until we figured out how to play, but I did not enjoy it as much as the first 2 games.

Week 2:

• I liked playing the character building games, or games with characters.  It was a was a depressing topic when having to kill all your characters, but it was still a fun game and a different concept than anything we’ve played before. I liked playing the medieval game when you had to buy each card and choose when to play it.  Once we got the hang of it, it was really fun and easier to play.

Week 3:

• Takenoko and Pandemic were my favorite to play. The Italian game was hard to understand, even with the English directions. We also kind of made up our own rules because it was hard to understand what exactly we were supposed to do.  Takenoko was a lot of fun, and I also liked playing in teams. Once we all go the hang of them game, it was really fun and cute. Pandemic was my favorite. We needed to sure the world and the directions were easier to understand. We did not get to finish the game, but I wish we did.

Card Ideas:

• Dominos
  • Have to play the card in hand
• Special Card
  • Get the card and keep it until all cards are gone
  • Rules
• Changing Rules
  • Bunch of cards with rules
  • Out if rules not followed
  • Last man standing wins

Chess Ideas:

• Tetris
  • Stack pieces
  • Dice tells which pieces to play
  • Tower cannot fall
• Play with all colored pieces
  • Memory Game
• Hop Scotch
  • Dice tells how many jumps
  • Cant land on different colored space
  • Last player standing
  • checker piece out if land on an X space

Themes:

• Spy Game
  • One person is a double-agent
  • Guess who it is
• Building
  • has to build their “tower” first
• Witchy
  • Collect ingredients for a spell
  • Be the first to cast a spell
  • Obstacles and Magic Cards
• Fly a plane through a storm
• Salem Witch Trials
  • Don’t get burned at the stake
• Crystal Garden
  • Good vs Bad person/witch
  • Get the crystal before the other
  • Maze
• Zodiac
• 13 Ghosts
  • Save their souls

Building Game Ideas

1. Royal Garden – Tile building game
   Compete with other players to build the most beautifully structured and floral garden for the King and Queen.
2. Animal House- Tile building game
   Work cooperatively with players to build a suitable home for your adopted pets.
3. Bulk Up – Deck building game
   You’re a squirrel preparing for winter by bulking up and stashing food. In this game, you do not play nice. The squirrel with the most nuts wins.
4. Career Builder – Deck building game
   Everyone has to start somewhere. Gain experience cards to level up your character. Trade experience cards, resources, and education cards for job cards worth more points. The player with the most points wins.
5. Burrowing Fox – Tile building game
   You play a Papa or Mama fox burrowing your new home for your family. Add tiles to extend your burrow and add much-needed resources for more points. Protect your fox from pretenders with repellent cards.

Game Reviews

NanoBot is a tile building science fiction game set in a petri dish. Each player has a bot with its own special skill that must be used to form the longest chain of NanoBots. Although the theme is unique, I did not feel like it was as immersive as Pandemic or other story filled games. The rulebook was slightly cluttered and could have been simplified. I did enjoy the reaction cards which spiced up the gameplay and made it more competitive.

Carcassonne is another tile-placing game but players are adding tile to build out a Medevil territory. The different tiles must connect with cities, roads, or grasslands, and players must decide to put down a corresponding knight, a robber,  monk, or a farmer. When an area is complete, it scores points for that player. The rulebook was rather confusing and our group sought further instructions online. The basic principles seemed easy, set down tiles and try to get the most points. I believe our group might have been a bit hasty with our few wooden characters so the game got pretty boring when we were just laying down tiles at the end. I think the puzzle-like form was the most intriguing part of the game.

1. Long Live the King – Players are part of the royal court and work to expose one player as an assassin hellbent on the King’s life. The King is stubborn and dull, so proof plays a large part in this deduction game.

2. Taste Tester – Players are high ranking government officials, and must hire taste-testers and chefs to enjoy their meals without fear of poisoning. At the same time, they try to plant phony chefs and testers in the kitchens of the other players.

3. Hypnosis – Players are competing street performers all specializing in psychic abilities. Competition has gotten fierce, and the players are now all trying to hypnotize each other to do each other’s bidding.

4. Cookbook – Players are novice alchemists working together to craft the right potions for their customers and keep their fledgling business alive.

5. Personal Space – Players are all socially terrified freshmen trying to maintain a minimum distance of 5 feet from any other human being.

5 game ideas around the theme of building

1. Trailer park – the board game is a “map” of wealthy neighborhoods. It is your job to ruin the neighborhoods by building up a trailer park. Person with the most trailer parks at the end wins.
2. Junk yard art. Play until the junk yard runs out of junk. Every player is dealt a card stating what they have to make. There are cards that make you miss your turn when you “have to go to work that day”. Person who has the closest looking junk art to their image card, wins.
3. Western game. Back in the old western time when no one knew anything outside of their own town. Each player on their turn gets to pick to either expand the board, build a new town, trade, or use a good to better their score. Score is tallied by who has the most towns and the most / best goods. A player could automatically loose if they ‘get shot’ for trying to steal or cheat their way into getting a better good, or even if they step foot into a bad town.
4. Make-up artist. Have to give the dummy a make-over while blind folded.
5. Steel city. Beginning of the Pittsburgh era and everyone has to work together helping build up the city, but this time trying not to pollute the air.

5 Theme Ideas

1. Time Machine – go back to the land of the dinosaurs and have to try and save different species of dinosaurs. They cannot ride in the time machine, but you can ride the time machine back to the future to get supplies when needed. Work individually or as one big team to save as many as you can. You can only save one species at a time. To qualify as saving the dinosaur it must make it past the big bang. Once one species is saved, you can start your strategy over to save another species.
2. Tip the ice berg. Play as penguins and the goal is to be the one who tips the ice berg. The board plays against you, and doesn’t want to tip. Whose ever penguin eats a ____ number of fish first, tips the ice berg and wins.
3. Football checkers – line starts in the middle of the game board. Take turns moving your players trying to block and protect your end zones. First “team” to 5 touchdowns wins.
4. A ship of goods for trading is sinking, you must throw things over board to stay afloat. But the ship is taking on water and a storm is brewing. You must save cargo, or throw things over board. You are in control of your own hand of cards and must help save the ship with everyone else. You are pretty far from the coast and it will take the rescue team some time to get to your ship. If you and your crew can save more than $____ worth of goods, you win. The more expensive goods are the heavier they are. The cheaper, the lighter.
5. College themed game. Must pass college with the disadvantages of cheating on tests, forgetting homework, but bonus points for going to a party the night before a test and passing the test. The board is against you and you must over-come it and pass. First one to graduation wins.

Tokaido probably had the most definitive phases out of any of the games thus far. I’m not sure if it’s because I’ve become more apt to noticing the phases, or if it was the game itself, but I could definitely tell when I had a definitive gameplan, and when I felt like our team was going to win. The game itself was really unique, and I found the theme to fit really well. I enjoyed trying to deduce the objectives of the other players, and think of how they interact with my objectives.

Pandemic could have been more fun if we hadn’t encountered an outbreak on both the first and second turn of the game. If I remember correctly, 3 cities started at level 3 infection, and the outbreaks both occurred in one of these cities. I looked up how many cities there were after the game and found it to be 48. Given a deck of 48 cities, there was a 3/48 * 2/47 = 0.27% chance of that happening. Frustration aside, I was able to enjoy the game for a short time. The theme and mechanics were both fairly unique, and I felt as if I was useful to the team until we inevitably lost. Dealing with 2 outbreaks in the first 2 turns is hard.

8 Minute Empire was difficult, but only because of the rules. The English translation didn’t quite specify where the starting region was, so we had to infer it as the center region (the other playgroup inferred it as the 4 corners and each player began in a separate one – I don’t know which one was correct). I also had trouble determining whether having n of a card counted for x points per card or x points total, and I never figured out why there were resource tokens (which we never took out of the box). Once I had a general idea of how the game worked, I became engaged and concerned with other player’s expansion, but I was so concerned with how to play the game that the theme didn’t even cross my mind.