Week 13 - Competitive Play

In Week 13 of Designing for Play, we looked at the channel, "Watch It Played", and chose one board game that we wanted to learn more about. We also looked at GDC's video, "Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces."

 The board game that I chose to learn is a game called Space Mountain, which has some similar components to the game that we are designing for our board game project.  The first component of Space Mountain that is similar to our group's board game is the general overview. Watch It Played describes the overview as players trying to go around the map, fulfilling missions on their five cards. Our game, currently titled Northern Regalia, also has players going around the map, claiming territories to expand their army's overall power. Multiple game pieces for the players are used in our game, which seems to be another slight difference. One mechanic from Space Mountain that I liked and will be considering implementing into our game is the refueling mechanic. In Space Mountain, if you were to run out of fuel before returning to your "base",  you would lose all tokens on your mission cards, resulting in a halt in progress. A way that we could bring this into Northern Regalia is by making a player vulnerable if they didn't finish their turn inside of a village, allowing other players to attack them and potentially have an advantage in the associated attack. 

GDC's video, "Designing Great UX into Your Game Board and Pieces," talks about suggestions that could be provided to a game called Cartagena to improve it. One suggestion that he made was to remove the misleading icons (a skull, a gun, and a knife) and change them to something less misleading (like a crown, a treasure map, and a goblet). There was another card marked as an arrow that informed users to read the rules whenever the card was in play, a reference card could help here instead. I think that this might be an issue for Northern Regalia going forward. With our villages and troops, there are many traits associated with them, we may have to decide which ones to keep on the card for players to have a full reference to while removing others to maintain full knowledge of what each card does.