Week 8: Card Game Playtesting

In class, we play-tested each other's card games! It was fun to see how everyone's ideas came together. I am super proud of how our card game, Magellin's Mission, turned out.  My group spent multiple hours designing, printing, cutting, and gluing the final copy of our cards. Our first play-test round was a success! Everyone seemed to love our game, and I couldn't be happier. I was able to go around and test other group's games. It is fun to see how everyone came up with different ideas for a travel "shedding" game. In The Art of Game Design, Chapter 8 says, "Game developers of every stripe have one thing in common: they are proud of their craft. Naturally, then, many find the idea of doing a “quick and dirty” prototype completely abhorrent. Artists will spend too much time on early concept sketches—programmers will spend too much time on good software engineering for a piece of throwaway code. When working on a prototype, all that matters is whether it answers the question. The faster it can do that, the better—even if it just barely works and looks rough around the edges." This is true. My group wanted to create the perfect prototype and blow the players away. We spent so much time perfecting the cards for our prototype and had to scrap every card. This was very discouraging, as I put a lot of time and effort into these cards. I am glad we prototyped our game because we ran into a lot of unforeseen issues. Next time, when we are required to create a prototype, we will actually create a prototype so we don't have to scrap all the time and effort if we were to create final product-worthy cards.  In Unboxed: Board Game Experience and Design, it asks these important questions, "What’s the goal of the game? What are the players trying to do? You get caught up in all these cool ideas you want to have in the game, then you can start off with the big picture: okay, what are players trying to do?" These questions are important and were taken into consideration during the design process of our card game. We wanted the goal to be to survive all 4 biomes and find civilization. The next question was, how do we get there? When we first prototyped our game, we had a lot of feedback and had to reorganize the ideas and goals. It was important to us to determine what we wanted the players to do and what the goal of the game was. I'm glad we prototyped because our game would have been a complete failure. We needed more cards, a card explaining what to do, different cards for each of the different biomes, etc. This was a fun process, and it all paid off when we played each other's games last class. Our game was a huge success, and I couldn't be more proud.