Week 3: A simple mod

In class,  we learned how to play a simple "board game." This game consisted of multiple strips of paper that had different images on them. All of them were part of a river. One strip was the "sand bar," another was "waves," and the largest strip was the "shoreline. " The rest of the pieces had rocks, lily pads, and other river features. In this game, each player has three game pieces or "rafts." Each player, starting with the youngest, rolls a 6-sided die and moves their "raft" however many spaces on the die. After each player has a turn, the bottom strip of the river is placed at the top, and all other strips move down. The goal is to reach the shoreline and not have your rafts on the bottom strip. If there are pieces on the bottom strip, then they are kicked out of the game. If your "raft" lands on the sandbar, you are stuck there until your next turn, no matter how much you roll. If you land on the waves, you are able to move up 3 strips. When looking at this game and deciding on what we wanted to change, we came up with a few ideas. If players rolled a 6, the rules were to either move one of your pieces up to where another one is or move a player back one. We changed it to if you roll a 6, you can either move your "raft" up 6 or move another player anywhere on the board back 1. We also decided if two players land on the sandbar at the same time, they are then to battle with the dice. Whoever gets the larger number moves up a space, and whoever gets the lower number moves back. We also wanted to give a chance of redemption for the pieces that got knocked off, so we decided if you roll a 1, you can either move a current piece up 1 or revive a "fallen" piece.  In the 3rd chapter of "Games, Design, and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design, it says, "Think broadly about the kinds of play lets us focus on the sort of play experience we want to give our players." When my group was deciding how to alter this game, we thought about how a group of players would like to play. We decided that competition and sabotage would be more entertaining.  In Chapter 2, it says, "Part of what makes games fun are the unusual ways they let us interact with the world." My group did not have an experience with this, but we witnessed another group using a play Nerf gun to be able to shoot pieces off the board. This is a fun element to experiment with. I think it is interesting to see a simple and traditional board game be modified in multiple different ways but all remaining kind of the same. It is interesting to have parts of the game interact outside of the playspace. This is something that I will be considering next game that we plan to modify. In the 4th Chapter of the book, it says, "Achievers are interested in setting and obtaining goals in a game. Sometimes these players focus on the stated goals–win, collect all the coins, complete every optional mission." We had one player in our group who just wanted to win. They created multiple ideas to sabotage the other players but ended up sabotaging themselves. It was fun to experience this because although his ideas were fun and created for him to win, he wasn't able to win a single game. I saw the frustration, and this is what made us all come together and think. We liked the idea of sabotage, advantages, and disadvantages. We were excited to incorporate these into our game. Before we could develop these ideas any further, it was time for us to go. It was fun testing out our own ideas and manipulating a simple game into something more entertaining and fun.