WEEK 3 | Territorial Acquisition Game Workshop

WORKSHOP AIM:  Design a game where players start with assets X at point A and must finish with the most assets / land to be declared winner

1.  Concept / theme / narrative:  We came up with lots ideas eg.  Mutant frogs after lilly pads in a pond, vampires after blood (in the form of humans!!).  But as Colin mentioned, choosing a well know concept automatically sets up a narrative eg.  If you have a pirate game, its pretty much a given that you'll be after treasure.  Mutant frogs ??? Meh.

Since our group had all recently been watching Sci Fi, we settled on a space theme, with warring factions/races contesting resources/planets.  

2.  Game mechanics:  This was tough.  We knew that there would be a competition for resources, but we had to decide whether we wanted the game pieces to be able to move around the board or whether they were to be strategically placed and left.  Additionally, how the capture the enemies resources would take place and ultimately what the game board would look like.  There were some really good ideas eg. from travelling through worm holes to move pieces around the board so as to capture enemy territory, to space connect-four to our final design of having 6 planets divided up into 6 territories.  And our ideas kept getting more and more complicated.  We got to the stage were we really had to dumb it down.

Final design - the core mechanic is to place a game token on a planets territory, with the intention of placing as many pieces of your colour on that planet to capture it.  

GAMEPLAY:  

• Best played with 4 players, each with a handful of tokens, a different colour for each player
• Each territory is marked with a particular resource eg. gold, water, minions, unuptoniam and coal.
• There is a deck of cards, one card for each resource as well as three "wild" cards eg. Nuke a territory (remove an enemies token), persuadatron (trade places with another player) and something like Hostile takeover where you can take over one enemies game token.
• On each turn, a player draws from the shuffled card deck. 
•  If they get a resource card, then they place one of their tokens on any ONE of the territories marked with that resource
• If a wildcard is drawn, you follow its instructions eg. remove an enemies token
• A planet is captured when a player has control of 4 adjoining territories on the planet.

3.  Conflict - Conflict is presented when deciding which planet to try and capture or which enemy to try and thwart.  At first I thought this game might be too simple and boring, but when we actually play tested it ourselves, we had a lot of fun.   The social element is what makes this game enjoyable, so it should definitely be played with a minimum of four players.  There is so much enjoyment in pissing of your competitor by thwarting him at every opportunity in his aim to take over the world!!  

4.  Play testing by an outside group - On the whole, the new group enjoyed the game.  Their game started very differently from ours - theirs was very slow and quite frankly, frustratingly boring.  Its main failing was the lack of more resource cards in the deck, thereby leading to a higher chance of getting a wildcard.  On their play-through, the group picked up mainly wildcards in the first few rounds.  This led to limited game play as most players didn't even have tokens on the board.  It was noted that during this slow period of play that the players movements to grab their cards for their turn were slow and unenthusiastic.   

Once play progressed however, the speed of game play increased as players got more tokens on the board and the competition increased.  We began to see the same kind of social interactions that our group experienced on our play-through eg.  laughing, friendly competitive banter, fists in the air.  Players would start targeting the last player who screwed them over, resulting in some fun gameplay strategy.  The players liked the lack of dice needed in the game and they kept playing after the testing was complete, which is always a good sign.

SUGGESTIONS MADE:

• If all the minerals are taken on the board, have something else happen than just choosing another card
• Having the mineral and wildcards in separate piles.  On a turn, a player is given the choice of picking up a mineral and placing their token appropriately, or they can take the risk by taking a wildcard (there would have to be the addition of a negative effect card).  **REALLY GOOD IDEA!!