Category: Game Ideas

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…

I have spent time today in class making changes to my game, which was previously called “DISASTERS” and has now been changed to “BLAST RADIUS.” The original name was a working title as the original concept of the game was to have multiple different “disasters” that could be chosen from to change the story of the game. However, I found that the complexity that this added wasn’t really worth the amount of work that it would take to make different cards for different decks. I doubled down on the nuclear reactor explosion as the disaster, hence the name change.

I also spent time putting all of the possible items that can be drawn into a spreadsheet to manage the balance for further play-testing. The screenshot of what that looks like and how it was organized is below.

I also spent a bit of time in class designing proofs for the backs of the item cards and objective cards to see what a final version of the cards might look like. Those images are also below.

Let me know what you think 🙂

If you have ever seen a dart board, just imagine that in 10x the size and kicking a soccer ball instead of throwing a dart. That is already a game that exists, but what I wanted to do is create a smaller version of this game that is portable and fun for friends to break out quickly. It is a game that is similar to flick football with paper, but in this case the board is made out of velcro and comes with a soccer ball made out of velcro.

Each player gets three tries to flick the mini soccer ball at the target. The target has 5 possible zones to hit with points ranging from 1-10. For reference see my wall section in the classroom.

Spelunker – a game where players discover and explore cave systems that can hold treasures like weapons of value and money

Campus Trades – A game where players begin with a single item of little to no value and try to trade up to any piece of RMU apparel

We Brawl – A game in which players randomly choose items of value at random, and fight each other to gain more loot or maintain their current loot

Civil War Explorer – A game in which players explore Civil War battlefields with a metal detector and see what they can find

One Plague Doctor – A game where players search for the single antidote that can cure anyone of any illness

1. Uno, Dos, Traceeee – Players take turns drawing playing cards (with 5 in hand) trying to collect three groups of either sequential numbers or same suits. First to three groups of three wins!
2. Roley Poley – Players take turns rolling die. The number they role corresponds with how many cards they can draw from a regular shuffled deck of cards. The number on the card corresponds with a number and those give players points. The person with the most points wins.
3. That’s Mine – players use a board similar to chutes and ladders, however each space is a territory. Players take turns spinning the wheel to know how many spaces they can progress. Each territory can be beneficial or negative in terms of points. Some may give players up to 5 points, but others can take away up to 5 points.
4. Mix and Match – Players take turns flipping over cards to make a match, if you get a match, you keep it. The player with the most matches wins. Each time someone gets a match the cards get shuffled.
5. Kick it to win it – Players take 3 turns each kicking a soccer ball at large grid of numbers ranging from 1-10. if a player hits a target they collect that number of points. First player to 21 points wins. Go over and you go back down to 17.