Board Game Prototyping

The game my partner and I created was a turn based game played over a hex grid. It could be considered a strategy game, but it wasn't quite at that stage when we ended class on Thursday. The point of the game was to maneuver your piece to have line of sight of your opponents piece and then roll for attack range, and if they were within range, you defeated their piece and earned yourself a win, played first to 3 wins. The game was kind of fun and there were definitely moments that were stressful or just plain funny, but it wasn't anything anyone would spend money on.

Original Game

Mechanics - Before: The mechanics at the end of class would be grid movement, turn based, and dice rolling

Play 1 - In class: After the brainstorm session in class, my partner and I played the game ourselves. We noticed quickly that the game would be fairly short, and decided to make the game be decided by a first-to-three point system. Even with this system in effect, the games went by quickly, each one taking about 2-3 minutes, the longest one being probably 5 minutes. There were some nerve-wracking moments, such as when we were moving back and forth after continuously rolling low moves, or the time where I thought I had taken the game by getting directly next to the other piece only to roll a zero and enter XCOM flashbacks, but the simplicity of the game simply didn't leave much of an impression.

Missing at point blank range, XCOM style

Play 2 - At Home: I decided to start the at home playtest by playing the original game without making any changes. The first time my family and I played, the game went incredibly quickly, we both made a beeline for each others' pieces, and each round finished within a minute, with it basically being a game of chance. From this, we both agreed that there simply wasn't enough strategy to make the game engaging and prevent it from being completely based on RNG. We increased the number of units from one to three (soldier, scout, and sniper, the alliteration wasn't planned) and gave each of them their own movement and range modifiers, and then started our second game. At this point I should mention that, since my family is in the middle of moving and I didn't have any pieces to use at home, we played in tabletop simulator.

The new and improved rules, not sure if they're readable

Play 3 - Class Again: This time, the game was significantly more engaging. Having 3 different units to move around meant we had a lot more options for strategy. Should I send the sniper and try to get a high roll to take this unit out from a distance? Or should I send the scout and try a rush? we only got to play one game, but even that was helpful, as we decided the ranges were all to long, and so reduced the scouts range to 2 and the Knights range to 4

game played after the rule change, knight is the soldier, thief is the scout, and archer is the sniper

Mechanics - After: after the changes I decided I could finally add strategy to the list of mechanics

The Resistance Session Report

The game I played in class and will write my session report on was The Resistance (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/resistance). The game was played with Nelson Nguyen, Ricky Reyes, Alex Mai, Hoagie Do, Austin Anderson, Fion Leong, and Madhuri Jujare

Round 2 of the first game

Mechanics: The mechanics listed by BoardGameGeek are partnership, simultaneous action, and voting. I would personally also consider it player elimination, as even though no players leave the game, if a player is confirmed as a spy, they've basically been eliminated from the game.

Game 1: After playing a practice game to familiarize ourselves with the rules, we started the first game. The spies were Alex, Hoagie, and myself. The first round, a spy was chosen to go on the mission, but played a pass card to relieve themselves of suspicion. The second round, another spy was placed on the team, and played a fail, but the resistance became suspicious of another resistance member. The third round passed without a spy on the team. The fourth round, which requires at least 2 fails, got it's original team proposal rejected, but thankfully passed the second time with 2 spies on the team, who managed to fail the mission, but the two spies got suspicion placed on them. In the final round, the last spy, who no one had suspicions of (or at least not enough people did), managed to get onto the team and failed the mission, achieving victory for the spies.

Game 2: In the second game, Alex and myself were once again on the spies team, but this time our ally was Nelson. This time, the first round passed without any spies, but the second round ended in a failure. Suspicion quickly fell on the correct person, and all other rounds managed to succeed (round 4 had one fail, but required two to fail)

Summary: The Resistance's rules were easy to learn and were quickly grasped after only one practice game. We were able to play one practice game and 2 real games within the class time, with about 15 minutes remaining in class, which means the games took an average of ~17 minutes. I only ever played as a spy, so I can't comment on playing as the resistance, but most of the fun of the game came from managing to convince the other players that you were innocent, and laughing as you played a fail card. I imagine the Resistance players would be more stressed during team picking, since they don't know who to trust.
 

Adopt an Arcade Game

For this blog post the class was required to play a game off the Internet Arcade from archive.org, and I chose to play good old Tetris. I've played many versions of Tetris on many different platforms, including the arcade cabinet, so I thought it would be a good game to comment on how playing it on an emulator is different from other platforms.

One of the first things I noticed was that the game was actually much easier on an emulator, as arrow keys are much more accurate than an old arcade machine joystick. Other than that, the emulator had a lot of performance problems, and constantly slowed down. Compared to versions of the game designed for computer, rather than emulated arcade machines, It ran very poorly.