“Independence” Board Game
This is one of the assignments for my second year module “Play & Games. It focuses around a group project of designing and creating a modern tabletop game based around a current social, political or economic subject that should be researched. As part of a five person group, I was involved in doing some thorough research into current events and how some of them could be tied into an interesting game concept. The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate that even without the modern tools of game engines and computer code, the principles of game design have been around for centuries through the use of board games that require lots of thinking into designing. The key difference between designing software/games and designing a board game is that you are creating exactly the experience that the player will have. Unlike video games, where the player is typically given the freedom to do as they wish and you don’t know what it will play like until you have created something, with a board game, everything you create will be something the player can experience. For this reason, it is important to make sure the game is playable without any big hitches that could cause a player an easy win over and over.
The research
When designing our game as a group, we first had to do some reserach around what the theme would be. The topic had to be something that was currently or recently in the news. After an original first theme related to alcohol, we ended up changing the game to be based around the idea of a country or state’s independence. This is due to all of the recent news relating to different states calling for independence. The most recent examples at the time of designing this game was Catalonia as they had just declared their independence as their own state, which causes widespread media coverage.
The gameplay
After we set on our theme of a country’s independence, we had to change around some of our core gameplay features to fit with this theme. We made the game so that the goal is to declare your own state’s independence and have the highest levels of economy, morale, pride and leadership. Once a player’s individual values for these are at least 10 or higher, they can declare their indepence. After one round has passed, their game has ended and their score is gathered by adding up the total of their values. However, after declaring their indepence, the other players can play different cards and events in order to bring down somebody’s values, making them have a lower overall score at the end. By the end, the game proved to be quite fun to play by peers and other testers.
Conclusion
This was a very different task to what I have previously done at university but I really enjoyed partaking in it as I believe it teaches you some of the core concepts of actual game design as oppose to the very technical aspects of developing computer games. By learning some of these more core game design skills from creating a board game, I think I am better equipped for the games industry as a whole.
