Under the weak that have passed we have developed a prototype for our board game assignment.
Before we reached the concept that we currently have, we explored a few other ideas. Including a prison game with the esthetics of feeling hunted and paranoid and a card based poetry/ sentence building game with the esthetics of having fun and being creative.
In the end we rotated back towards our first concept but changed the esthetics to feeling hunted and feeling that you could make moves of strategic importance.
In the game that we have so far, you play as a mouse trying to find a cheese and bring it back to your nest.
It is a board game built out of hexagon tiles laid out in a teardrop or scull shape with the starting position at the narrow end. At the wider end, opposite a number of tiles are placed face down on the board, one of these tiles has the cheese and the rest are blank. Between the cheese tiles and the players starting position, is a number of obstacle tiles laid out.
The players use a card based movement system to make their way across the board. The cards have values ranging from 1-5 higher concentration of 3’s, than 4’s and 2’s and the least of 1’s and 5’s. The players draws five cards at the start of the game, then takes turns moving, using one or two cards per turn. The mice move in a straight line, taking the same number of steps as the number off the card they have played. If a player runs into a wall or an obstacle their turn is over. If the player has two or less cards on their hand they get to draw two new cards before their next turn. If they have three or more the player only draws one new card.
When a player finds the cheese (by landing on top of the correct cheese tile) the goal is to make it back to the starting position with the cheese. The goal of the other players now become to steal the cheese from the player holding it and then make it back to the start position themselves. This can be accomplished by bumping into the player holding the cheese, which engages combat between the two players.
The combat mechanic is tied to the movement cards. When you engage combat both players lay down a card at the same time, the player with the highest value wins the cheese. If the cards have the same value another card is played until one player ether gives up or run out of cards. The loosing player is stunned for one turn after the combat, giving the victorious player a chance to escape.
The game ends when the player with the cheese reaches the start/end position.
Jessica Andersson 