Ames' syllabi

Materials- 4 Garden beds, 38 material cards, 67 plant cards, 40 plant models, 42 customer cards, 100 bills, 30 sun ships, 30 water chips, and 30 fertilizer chips.  

Set up – To start every player will get a plant bed, 4 plant cards, 4 material cards, 2 sun chips, 2 water chips, and 2 fertilizer chips. The player will then lay out their plant cards in front of them, face up and keep the material cards in hand hiding from the other players. You will also place 2 customer cards of each difficulty face-up in the middle of everyone and separate all the plant models. 

Starting the game- The player who bought a plant the most recently will start first. Each card will have specific rules to fully grow the plant to be able to put into their shop. At the start of your turn, you will pick up one material card and 2 of any chips. You can only grow up to two plants per turn and sell to one customer per turn, unless a material card states otherwise.   

Garden Beds- Each shop can hold up to 8 plants at a time.

Material cards- These cards can give you water, sun, or fertilizer. You can also receive “power-ups” that may assist you in growing and selling your plants.

Plant cards- These cards will show you what species they are and a picture of the plant. At the bottom of the card, it will show what it requires to grow. For example, it may need sun, water, and fertilizer or it could be sun, sun, and water. Once you have all the required things to grow your plant you can now grab a plant model and put it into your shop.  

Customer cards-  Each customer card has a level of difficulty to it. Easy, medium, and hard, and each of those cards will be worth the money. Each card will show the required plants you need to be allowed to sell to them. An easy card might have an aloe plant and is worth $10. Whereas a hard difficulty will have 3 plants that are hard to grow but it will be worth $25.

To win the game- The first person to get $100 will win the game. 

Steal a plant- If you get a “steal a plant” card, you can keep that card as long as you like and use it on your turn. When you steal a plant the plant has to be in the player’s shop. 

Plants died- If you get this card you must play it immediately. The only plants that will die are the ones in your shop. If you have none in your shop you can discard this card. 

Robbed card- If you get robbed, all the plants in your shop will be gone. Not any plants that are still growing. 

Switch plants- If you get a switch plants card you can play this on any of your turns and you can switch any plants whether it’s in the shop or still growing. 

Superfoods- With this card, you can fully grow a plant with one of these cards.

Flood card- This card must be played immediately and affects every player. When this is played you must lose two plants that are in the players shop. 

Mega buy- A mega buy card is a big buyer and will purchase 3 of any plants from your shop. If you don’t have three plants it will buy what you have. 

I have had some thoughts about how I’d like this game to be played.

First, some changes to the board. I modified the board to have larger neighborhoods, which by effect made less individual areas but increased the amount of playable space. I think that allowing more of anything to be played in a given spot is more fun. For example, I tried to limit the amount of blank space that can only accommodate a four long game piece because it doesn’t really allow for any choice besides color.

I also removed the animated people moving about the streets. I thought it was a cool use of the display but several people were confused as to what they represented and since it was only cosmetic, I didn’t feel the need to keep them for this version.

I also rebalanced some of the pieces. I wanted more pieces that had parking in the center of the piece, or rather fewer pieces that had it on an edge. The thinking with this was that it is a little too easy to stack pieces when only the very edge gets disallowed after each play.

Lastly, I want to limit which spaces that can be played in to only allow three neighborhoods to be played in at a given time. By only allowing development in a new space once there are no legal moves left in the other areas, players are forced to confront the dwindling space and it also visualizes the sprawl across the space over time.

Below is a video of me playing through a full board with these changes in effect.

Due to the nature of my game, many different people would be interacting with it so my goal with these rules was to have something very simple that people could easily partake in. This is the version of the rules that was posted in the gallery and tested during the senior showcase opening:

Objective – Create new development and re-develop existing space

Materials – Pick 3 development pieces of any shape and color

Play your turn – You may play pieces anywhere you would like, including on top of other developments, except:

1. You can’t play on top of that same color

2. You can’t play on top of a grey parking space

The Game Ends when – There is no space left that can be developed

ARGs: A World Without Oil

This was brought up in another class (maybe 4D?). This is an interesting concept and I think that anything that challenges people to change their daily habits and reflect is probably a good thing, although I am still not sold on the “game-ness” of this. The open source narrative could maybe be viewed through a documentary lens but since this existed in the thoughts of people who participated and made videos and posts, it’s harder for me to view it as a game.

Discovery Tour by Assassin’s Creed

I am highly skeptical about this being a game for change. I guess I should say that I am cynical of Ubisoft as a company and anything that they make. I struggle to see this reuse of game assets as anything other than an advertisement for the Assassin’s Creed games; something that I have very little interest in to begin with.

Detroit Become Human

I recall when this game got really big on YouTube with lots of people doing Let’s Plays although I never got invested in it. I think my assumption at the time was that it was along the lines of iRobot. I wasn’t aware of there being a deeper message to be attained and I am a little skeptical of games that claim to have branching paths depending on your decisions because I feel like the choices that you make don’t always actually do anything to change the outcomes. I would be open to playing this game now and I am glad that I managed to avoid spoilers for it.

Factorio

I am familiar with Factorio for its addictive gameplay although I never considered it as a game for change. With something such as Minecraft, it is assumed that you as the player will change the environment that you’re in and there isn’t really anything to dissuade you against doing this since that is the core mechanic of the game. It is honestly really smart to have the player in Factorio consider the effects of their exploitation of resources.

Outer wilds

This game is on my wishlist; it looks so good. I love the Majora’s Mask type time mechanic and the world looks really beautiful. I suppose I will have to play it to better understand how this incorporates the idea of empathy but I imagine it is somewhere along the lines of how Celeste handled the idea of mental illness.

Gris

The visuals of this game definitely interest me. I love a good 2D platformer although it isn’t totally clear to me from the trailer what abilities you have as the player. I just mentioned Celeste as a game that has a focus on mental illness, but the main reason that I love that game is because of the movement. The entire process of playing through the game is improving your technical skills and by the end, you can practically dance through the world. I would hope that Gris is similar to this although it looks to be a much slower pace.

Gone Home

I really like this idea of discovering a story through bits of the game environment. The screenshots have the look of a horror game like something from Resident Evil so I was surprised to learn that there is such a strong emphasis on the characters and their relationships in this. I suppose it is thematically correct to have a sad game set in an old dark house.

The Layoff Game

The outrage that this game received is exactly what I think the creators were going for when they made it. It is comical to see the disconnect between people who just don’t “get it”. The gameplay of a match three game is nothing new but changing the theme to be about executives consolidating employees positions gives it an entirely new meaning.

Dumb Ways to Die

When I was growing up, I would play this original game on an iPad at a friend’s house. We had probably put about 10 hours all together into playing all of the mini games before finding a link to the song and realizing it was a PSA about train safety. I can clearly remember being surprised at this. We were just taking turns playing the game because it was fun. Now THAT is how you do a game for change!

Fake it to Make it

I don’t think we played enough of this game to really grasp all of the gameplay. I couldn’t totally tell how different fake news stories that we could create had different impacts on our stats although I suppose the point was already made. It was easy to just publish a bunch of garbage fake stuff and the more outrageous stuff got more traction. I am not sure how many people would play this game who are not already in tune with this issue however.

Cards Against Calamity

I wasn’t crazy about this game. The trade off that the game asked us as the players to make sometimes seemed inconsequential and other times were very harsh. It was never clear what the value of a resource was going to be and even after playing a few times through, there was too much randomness for my liking.

Cast Your Vote

I REALLY did not like this one. I can’t imagine anyone playing this willingly or having fun doing so. I do somewhat understand staying away from actual named political parties since you wouldn’t want to be seen as trying to indoctrinate kids but it just seems silly to ignore the fact that this is not how politics actually works.

I think we brought up the connection between sodas and advergames in class. I don’t personally agree, but the consensus is that all sodas taste the same, and that it’s the experience that comes along with the drink that differentiates them. Video games give the unique opportunity to create a totally unique and fantastic experience that exists outside of our real life, so in a world where a semi-made-up “experience” sells your product, a made-up video game experience seems like a no-brainer. That’s my takeaway from this.