Category: Game Ideas

1. Continuation of “Stick with the Flock” I would like to revise the rules better and create a more effective game in terms of what I want the metaphor to be and how the game looks!

• “Art Noted” a scavenger game Students are given a small photo of a close-up image taken of an art piece on campus, they are given one hint on its location in the style of a riddle and then they must try to find the piece based on knowledge of the area and the riddle.  Students can work in teams for time’s sake. If they find the piece, they win a point. The first to get 5 points wins! **This is meant to drive students to become more aware of campus art**

• “These FRICKEN DUCKS” a tag-like scavenger hunt One student will be given 20 ducks of the same color and size to hide around campus in one building of their choice. Another group of students is tasked with finding and collecting the ducks before anyone else! (Cause man, we hate ducks!)

• “Impersonation Game” How well do you know your friends?” Students must pick another student in the room to impersonate, you can’t be rude of course, so you must use body language, actions, and props to impersonate someone. We must find the good qualities about each other to find out who it is!

• “I promise we are artists” is a Pictionary game, but we suck at drawing! One student is given a card with an object, animal, or thing and is tasked with drawing it on a piece of paper without lifting the pencil, and they can’t look when they are drawing it. They have 30 seconds to complete their new portfolio-worthy masterpiece, and the other players must guess what the thing is without hints.

Amber Holt

1. Giant board game? – you get like a “game map” and you must travel to different locations, or buildings, like Wheatley, and answer trivia questions to collect an item. Every location has a unique item up for grabs and the first team of students to collect all of the items and return to “home base” wins. 
2. Sort of murder mystery like Clue – Inspired by a game a club that I was in hosted in high school, you travel to different areas across campus, collecting clues that give you details about who the “murderer” is, in this case a staff member” that eventually lead you to that person. For instance some of the clues could involve what building they work in, what major, what extracurricular activities they help out in, their hobbies, etc. When students reach the “murderer” they receive free RMU swag or other goodies
3. Scavenger duck (thanks to Sara) – students are encouraged to collect 1 duck of every color across campus. Students bring the ducks to a centralized hub where they get a punch card of sorts that marks that they collected that color of duck. Ducks are collected so that cheating is eliminated. For completing this, the participants could get a stuffed animal duck (to give incentive to play and not just keep the cute ducks). 
4. Battle of the departments – A canned food drive that is a competition between the different departments at RMU. The food would be donated to a local food bank (or taken to our very own one on campus) at the end of the competition. The winning department gets donuts or lunch. 
5. Game to conserve the most energy on campus – Chatham University did a game like this a few years back, promoting sustainability and energy conservation. It was a competition between floors in a dorm building to see who could conserve the most energy per floor. Because of the way the buildings were set up, they could go in and see per floor how much energy was being consumed. There was also some incentive like a prize for the floor to win. I also believe they had social media accounts or an online tracker set up so that the floors could see their progress and communicate with other floors. One issue with this was that some students, especially those who didn’t like their CA, would try to sabotage the results of other floors, constantly turning on lights. One benefit of this was that the school was able to recognize that students weren’t using their ovens (I believe) enough and they were removed from the dorms. This also helps eliminate unnecessary energy consumption and makes students realize the difference turning off and unplugging certain things can make.
   • For RMU to employ this, I think that it would need to be a competition between the different residence buildings and not particular floors. I think that would help to eliminate people sabotaging other floors in the same building. This would also have to have a time limit; for instance, 1 week (A good week would maybe be the week of Earth Day??). Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about how to measure energy consumption to say for certain how the results would be tracked, especially in RMU’s system. There would, however, need to be a really good prize to encourage students to actually participate.

• Table Top Gaming Marathon on Nicholson Lawn. (Ping Pong, Pool, Football, Air Hockey, etc)
• Glow and the Dark scavenger hunt
• Name the professor based on the clues
• Obstacle course that goes throughout campus
• Minute to win it – Carnival games addition

In your opinion, what should every game have? Why do you like your favorite game?

In my opinion, I feel as though every game should have a way you could personalize it to make it yours. For example, being able to make your own character, home, colors, designs, etc. Being able to add your own interests will allow you to be more drawn to the game. If I am playing a game and I don’t enjoy the characters available to play as, I feel like Id be less engaged because I cant relate to them. Being able to relate to the game allows for a sense of familiarity and comfort which humans are drawn towards.

List the games you’ve played and currently play.

sims 4, hayday, wii sports, wii sports resort, mario kart, minecraft

Can you apply the three act structure to your favorite game? What is its pacing and how long do you find yourself in each act?

Id say that I couldn’t apply the three act structure to my favorite game because its not like there is an end to the game you just keep playing until you don’t want to play anymore. There’s no say to when the middle of the game is either because it is never ending.

When coming up with ideas where do you find you start, with the metaphor or the mechanic?

I tend to focus on the mechanics before the metaphor because I’d rather build the basics first.

Over the course of this semester, who would you like to collaborate with and why?

I would like to collaborate with Will Wright because I enjoy playing the sims games and I think it is a really cool concept where we are able to escape from reality and create our own world.

5 Campus game ideas

relay race from Wheatley to Nicholson

who can make the biggest snowball

hide and seek in Wheatley

who can find patty first

freeze tag

Fluxx Questions

Was it fun?

Honestly no, I feel the game takes too long and I lost interest because of the constant changing of the goals and the rules.

What was the interaction?

The interaction was on the keeper cards. Some of the keeper cards allowed you to steal another players keeper card, gain more keeper cards, or have to get rid of a keeper card.

How long did it take to learn?

It took probably the length of the whole game to learn because the rules are always changing and you have to constantly read every card because you might have to do more than just take your turn.

Would you play again?

No. I am not a fan of the game.

1. Flashlight tag
2. Bobby cart, using the Bobby model and other carts to race around the campus.
3. hide and seek
4. scavenger hunt
5. shuttle dodge

My theme is drawing

A game where two teams get different prompts, but have to draw on the same surface to get the other team to guess what their drawing is of. There would be a limit of how long one team can draw, so as to not just make a mess.

A game where players add lines to a sort of open-ended illustration, and the others vote on the best interpretation.

Pictionary-style game, but the drawer has to wear some sort of distorted goggles.

A game where players draw a mask of a famous celebrity or character, pass them to the player next to them, then have to guess who they are through a series of questions.

A narrative style game where the story is dependent on the best drawing a player conjures of their preferred plot point.

A game that is basically Pokemon Go, but for sports trading cards, so you could use sports arenas and landmarks as stops.

A game where you can convince members of the other players’ tribes to join your tribe as you traverse a shared environment.

A video game where you’re a robot that can equip other parts of robots you overtake to become a sort of unkillable (or very hard to kill, rather) centipede robot.

A game that exists in town from the show South Park where you collect members of the show to unlock new scenes and scenarios.

A Beatles game where you drive around Liverpool collecting new chords to make new songs, much like IRL.

The Way of the Dragon is a board game in which the players protect and build their villages by establishing stable and compassionate trade routes with other villages.

Cardisaur is a card game in which the players complete a “dinosaur skeleton” by drawing cards from a large pool.

Boiling! is a mobile phone game in which the players must figure out who in their group is the odd man out by moving one step each turn, and their phone telling them if they are ”hotter” or “colder”.

Late for Work is a board game in which the players have to find the quickest route across the city using their unique municipal functions, all while navigating obstacles placed by the lone antagonist.

Invention Convention is a drawing game in which the players create the most useful and/or marketable invention by using the prompts and features the game provides.

Buzz Buzz

Buzz Buzz is a game where you play as a bumble bee and travel around a board of flowers collecting pollen. Once a player collects enough pollen they can make “honey”. Whoever makes the most honey is the winner of the game. (sounds simple but I’ve been playing with this idea for months).

Ghostly Silence

Ghostly silence is a game in which players must find a way to work together through the haunted house finding and trapping ghosts (ghost catcher would be handy). Talking about the game or ‘making noise’ in the house will trigger the ‘haunting’ deterring players from catching ghosts. The game ends when all of the ghosts in the house have been collected. I’d like ghost locations to change each playthrough (like Clue).

Cryptid Proof

Cryptid Proof is a game where players travel around a board with different cryptid locations with the goal of ‘photographing’ and proving each cryptid exists. Collect photos of each cryptid in order to win the game.

Library Prestige

Library Prestige is a card game where players each attempt to collect the most prestigious books that the can to fill their libraries (for fun we could put one Gutenberg Bible card in the deck). The player with the most amount of prestigious books is the winner.

Build-a-Zoo

Build a zoo is a game in which players collect different zoo animals in order to create the best zoo possible. The player with the biggest and best zoo with the most animals would be the winner of the game.

Week 1

5 game ideas that can take place on campus

• Giant Operation on the front lawn with comically large tweezers. Parts are placed in roped off sections that cannot be touched. Would be cool to record a birds eye of the game with a drone
• Push your luck mechanic scoring lawn darts. In the late game, you have to be precise with what you hit because getting too many points can have adverse consequences
• Team route building with people as the play pieces in the Rec Center gymnasium
• Whack-a-mole with the campus groundhogs: self explanatory
• Tucci simulator: Orienteering race but the control points are the black metal trash cans across campus and you must stop and say hello to every person that you see as well as say one nice thing about them or the day etc

Week 2

5 game ideas that can be played using cards

• Raid Boss: 50/25/25 (1v2) with a wager mechanic
• Deduction (one secret card, taking turns playing one card and if any attribute overlaps with your card you must state what it is. Maybe played with a deck of card numbers ,1-5? Hand size of 3?)
• You don’t know your 3 cards but your opponent does. If you play a card that is within 1 on either side your opponent can call it out and blow up that card. First person to lose all three of their cards loses
• Divided: Collect more pairs than your opponent as fast as you can over the course of 5 rounds. A pair consists of two cards that are cleanly divisible (eg. 3/9, 10/10, A/7). Aces are worth 1 and any card is divisible by it (Wild card)
• 2 players divide the deck and have some number cards randomly placed in front of them. They take turns drawing off of their own deck to place cards on neighboring cards. If they can’t play a card, it is reshuffled into their deck, and the first player to empty their entire deck wins

Week 3

5 game ideas that involve collaboration use the following format : [Game name] is a [category of] game in which [the players or their avatars] [do or compete or collaborate for some goal] by [using tools the game provides them].

• “Deduction” is a card game in which players must figure out the card that they have in front of them using clues provided by cards played by other players
• “Agnej” is a dexterity game in which players must stack Jenga pieces in various orientations to score points using only one hand each
• “Lockout” is a point to point movement game in which players navigate turning layers of an onion gameboard by rolling different dice and rotating the layers to benefit themselves or their teammate, while potentially sabotaging opposing team players
• “Trains, Planes, and Funiculars” is an engine building game in which players maneuver a landscape while building out various modes of transit
• “Ambitions as a Writer” is a storytelling game in which players improvise the details of a story based on a random prompt. Cards are drawn that give additional elements that players must respond to

Week 4

5 game ideas that revolve around a theme of of your choice (timed turn)

• Countermand: Spin poker chip, flip cards, first player to have control of the whole board wins
• Runaway: speed based hand management where players must make snap decisions of what to add or discard. Themed based on a runaway train that has limited time before it reaches a catastrophic end. The player that collects all of their necessary set stops their train
• Custom speed chess timer which has 30 seconds counting down in the actuated direction and up from 30 in the opposing direction (the time on both sides will always add up to 1 minute, however after some turns it may be at a 15/45 second split, etc). When the clock is clicked, that player draws a card that says something that they must draw to add to their composition. As such, there is a compounding effect of completing a turn quickly vs taking longer. If either player’s clock gets to zero the game ends and the players evaluate their compositions
• Players compete to stack various shaped wooden blocks as high as possible within a short amount of time. Each round is worth a set amount of points and the rounds get shorter as the game progresses
• Players progress around a circular game board in the shape of a clock with individual LEDs that highlight the sections. Different actions can be taken if a player is in a zone that is currently active but they must stop when the lights change color. Different colors also impact the actions that a player may chose to do

Week 5

 5 game ideas that revolve around the theme of collecting

• Inflation: you have buying power but every turn the cost of actions increases
• Battalion: progress the board to collect units that will do battle later in the game
• Dice building game: progressively gain more dice in your arsenal and roll all of them to determine your capabilities on a given turn. Rolling 1’s on any of the dice has a special effect
• Robot building: assembling pieces of a giant robot mech (like Voltron)
• Fish collecting game with the objective of assembling the coolest aquarium – basically the best part of Animal Crossing but as a standalone 30 minute board game

Today I prototyped and play tested. It gave me some more ideas and I will definitely be expanding on the idea of having a goal surrounding the Velcro’d area. I also adjusted the height of it to be less of a angled flick and more of a surface level flick, to make it less like a football field goal and more of a penalty kick type flick. I still have to figure out the best way, whether it be sharpie, paint or something else, to highlight the target or point areas within the goal on the black velcro. I also added the idea of having a goalie in the middle which isn’t velcro and whom if hit rejects the player from receiving points. This has potential. To be continued…