Independence - Play & Games
3 mins
Board Game Final Log
Since the last update, we have now been working on the game to improve the theme and re-design some of the components we need to change. The first thing we decided on was a new theme as we had been told that selling alcohol on the black market was too non-realistic for the specification. We brainstormed some different ideas from looking at recent news articles and trying to think of something interesting. One of the suggestions I came up with was the idea of the deeb web. This is something that has always been interesting to me and I wondered if it is something that we could make work. After discussing this theme and how the game mechanics would work, we decided that it would require changing a lot of the game mechanics to properly implement. So we went back to thinking of another theme. After some more ideas were thrown about, we eventually settled on the idea of political independence. This is because when browsing news sites, we noticed there always seems to be articles nowadays talking about some independence referendum whether it be Brexit or the recent state of Catalonia declaring it’s independence from the rest of Spain. These are always controversial and well talked about issues that are constantly in the media, so we thought it would be a good theme to stick with. After we settled on this, we then made a list of the different game mechanics we currently had and decided with each one, A if we could make it fit with the new theme, and B how we would have to change the mechanic for it to make sense in the context of the theme.
One of the mechanics we decided to get rid of was negotiations. The reasoning for this is that we just felt it wasn’t an interesting a component as some of the others, as well as the fact that it didn’t really fit with a theme of independence. Even though we got rid of negotiations, we kept the way in which they worked in the game. So the new action cards that the players have will have two components to them. They have an action that can be used to effect the gameplay and they also have an alternate ‘attack’ action that can be used instead in order to knock somebody else’s score down.
Another mechanic we got rid of was Auctioning. So in Black Liquid, auctioning was used for upgrading the equipment of the player so that you could increase how much profit you make for selling alcohol each turn. We thought with the context of political independence, this wouldn’t really work the way we intended, so decided to get rid of this and stick to the other many mechanics we still had left over.
After settling on which mechanics we were going to keep, we then just started adapting them over time, through several tests of how they would all work. For example, there are a few action cards that were being used in the earlier tests of the game, which we later decided to get rid of due to them not having much of an effect on the gameplay. We also had to decide how many of different action cards we were going to have. We settled in the end of having four of the same action cards. This way there was one to fit with each different policy type in the game. One of the other things we decided when making the cards was how the attack value would be worked out for each of the cards. We eventually decided that the more valuable the action of the card was, the higher attack value you could use it for on another player. This then means that players may save their good card so rather than using it for the action, they can save it to use as a big attack on another player later on in the game.
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