Ames' syllabi

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.

Theme Ideas

1. Spoiler Alert – Card Game
   Spoil movie plots and twists with your friends. Cards include movies, Spoilers, and actions. Each player receives a movie card, 2 spoilers, and 3 actions. Use deduction and luck to guess the movie each player has. Play spoiler cards to eliminate other players. Use action cards to steal, look, or remove other players cards.
2. Neon Highway – Board Game
   Travel the space highways of Metis, a galactic metropolis full of wonder. Played in the dark, this glowing neon board, glow in the dark dice, and cards help players maneuver through this distant city. Although the city is full of excitement, the natives do not like outsiders. Travel through the city and avoiding giving away your cover. Collect riches and souvenirs along the way.
3. Mirror City – Board Game
   A board that can be used on either side. Choose daylight and you play cops and robbers across the board. Choose night time to play detective and suspected serial killer. Follow the board throughout the city and choose to catch the killer or escape being caught.
4. Dynasty – Board Game
   It is now your land and your colony. Choose your animal, skill, class, and mineral to build your ranks and take over more land. Pick up cards along the way and play ones that benefit your colony. Who will be the next dynasty?
5. Crowded City
   Played similarly to Battleship and Guess Who? Two players sit opposite of each other with a towering building/city in-between. Place your characters throughout the city out of your opponents view. Guess the area and the correct character and the last one left in the crowded city wins.

Game Reviews

In Takenoko, players must grow bamboo in the emperors garden and feed the giant panda. Each player must tend to the garden, feed the panda, and add plots in order to complete objective cards and gain points. The game ends when a player reaches a set number of goals. Overall I thought the theme of the game was cute and lighthearted, but the mechanics seemed slightly random at times. I personally had a hard time learning all the rules and understanding the use of all the pieces. If given more time to look at the rules I would say it’s a good gateway game. The theme is original but not too complex, and the players have luck, interactivity, some ease of learning, and a replay value.

For Eight-Minute Empire we did not have the English rules so we looked up and used what we could find on the game. I do not believe we played it correctly but it was still an interesting idea. The game is obviously supposed to be face paced and uses an exploring-like theme in which players move their armies across a map to take over as much land as they can. Players must use their tokens to buy cards to use actions in the game. When eight cards have been played the game is over. I believe it could be a good gateway game in aspects of its simple theme, ease of learning (with the correct rules), interactivity, luck and replay value being quite high.

Pandemic is a co-operative strategy board game with the theme of violent disease outbreaks all over the world. Each player has a role and special strengths to help fight the outbreaks. through the different decks, actions, and cities players must fight the outbreak and stop the spread of infections. The only reason I could see Pandemic not being a gateway game would be because of the complexity and slight learning curve.

Out of the three games we played, I found Love Letter to be the most entertaining overall. I enjoyed the story behind it, and the game was fun and easy to learn. I felt very similarly about Hanabi in terms of story and enjoyment. Despite its simplicity, I found the rules of the game quite unique. While playing each of these games, I found myself appreciating the story especially, even thinking to myself how much less fun these games might be without one. With Love Letter and Hanabi, it’s a very smooth transition from the backstory provided by the game’s setting, and the story created by the players. The story created by the players even fits in logically with the backstory, which helps immerse the player. It’s interesting, then, that I enjoyed Flux as much as I did. The game epitomizes mechanics, and there is practically no backstory or theme – though, I suppose its lack of these attributes is the theme in and of itself.

You mentioned in class that the non-munchkin version of Gloom was much more depressing and grim. Given the level of depression that this version had, I don’t think I want to see just how depressing the original is. Nonetheless, I found the game fun and I enjoyed the way that the characters progressed, both mechanically and thematically, like how the cards we stacked on characters had sentences for names ([character] [card], [holly] [was betrayed by the dice]). One thing that I didn’t entirely like about the game was how abruptly it could end. In one instance, it felt like we were just getting into phase 2 of the game when one of the automatically played cards ended the game immediately. That card seemed like more of a snowball card than a headwind card.

I really enjoyed Dominion for the brief time I played it, and I was really disappointed that it ended early. It was really fun trying to remember what people’s decks consisted of (including my own), seeing what kind of strategies people were going for, and how everyone adapted to each other. For example, Desmond went for Militia’s early on and the other players started to grab Moats in response. I grabbed a lot of Villages to start, and when the pile was getting low, the other players tried to buy some Villages before they were gone. The theme wasn’t really ingrained in the gameplay, but just mechanically the game was a lot of fun.

1. [Courier] 3 players. A standard game of chess, except checkmate results in victory for both standard players. The idea is that these two kingdoms have important information for the opposing king that would surely prevent a looming war. There is a third player, an assassin, who controls a single queen. Their objective is to mate either king before another player does, preventing them from receiving the information and ensuring war. The queen has a set number of lives, and respawns after a set number of turns.

2. [Rubix Board] 2 players. Standard Chess or Checkers, but played on checkerboard Rubix Cubes. Given the constraints of developing a checkerboard pattern on a cube, only one face of the cube would be “playable” at any given time. Each player gets one move of the cube and one move of a piece per turn.

3. [Spiral] 2 players. Player 1 controls 4 pawns, positioned on the edge of the board. By rolling dice, they move their pawns around the board and in a spiral pattern towards the center. Player 2 controls a set of Bishops that attempt to destroy the pawns before reaching the center. Pawns may destroy bishops, Pawns win when 1 pawn reaches a set distance into the board.

4. [BattleChess] 2 players. The same as Chess, however each player is able to call in an aerial strike on any square on the board. The strike takes 3 turns to arrive, and renders the affected square unplayable for the rest of the game. It can not be moved through or landed on. Only one strike per player may be in progress at a time, and both players are aware of which squares are being hit.

5. [Oops All Kings! / Game of Thrones] 2,4,6,8 players. Using normal chess rules, each player controls 1 king placed equidistant from each other near the center of the board. Last man standing wins.

Bonus Game: [EA Chess] 2 players. The classic game of chess is “improved” with microtransactions, allowing players to purchase additional pieces during gameplay.

Review:

Last week, out of the two games, Pandemic was my favorite. I like how involved it was and how it was easy to connect with it emotionally. I feel like the game made it seem like you were in a real life situation, and you felt responsible any time there was an outbreak or a city was destroyed. I also like how everyone had to work together in order to succeed, which meant there had to be a lot of communication. As for the panda game, I liked how this game had a strategic value but for me it wasn’t as easy to connect to. It was very confusing at first and took a few rounds to get the hang of. This game was odd because everyone kind of had to work together, but at the same time you were competing against one another.

Game Themes:

1. Crime—this would be a board game where every player is a different character. There would be cards that lead you through the game that will either help or hurt you from finding the criminal. Whoever detects the criminal first wins. If no one detects the criminal and the criminal gets to his destination first, he wins.
2. Love Match—make love matches between different characters based upon likes and dislikes that are on the character card.
3. Money—test your strategy on making and saving money.
4. College Life—based upon personality, interests, and location, players will have to find the best college for their character and help them survive it.
5. Wizards—each player will have a character that is a different wizard with different capabilities. Players will race to the finish line using their powers against one another.

Game themes

1. Dinosaurs
   1. Explore evolution and mass extinction
2.   Possible bad days, things that go wrong, bad luck
3. Showers, bathing-routines, products,
4. Blanket forts
5. Snoring, sleeping positions, amount of blankets
6. Trash—recycling, landfills

Game design