WEEK 5 | Nursery Rhyme Workshop

Our goal today was to take a nursery rhyme, then use its story to create a game.

We choose Humpty Dumpty, and adapted the story as follows:

Humpty Dumpy is an evil egg who rules his empire from the top of his wall.  There are many kings and their men (the players) who try to topple Humpty from his lofty throne.  It is a dangerous mission that the kings-men must embark on.  They have their own petty squabbles to deal with, plus the yoke attacks from Humpty himself, perched self assuredly upon his wall.  It is a race to the end to see which knight can topple the evil egg and become a hero to his nation.

We then proceeded to design our game following the next 7 steps:

1.  Define the SPACE
Boardgame style, set on the vertical side of a wall.  Players advance up the wall.

2.  List the objects
Player tokens, a wall to climb (gameboard), egg yoke splatters that the player slips on, vines that creep up the wall, action cards that the player draws when they land on a blue square.

3.  Define the player actions
Players can move along the board, determined by a dice roll.  Players can advance rapidly up vines, but can lose ground when landing on an egg yoke, which causes them to slide backwards.  Action cards force a player to either advance or backtrack.  

4.  List the RULES
 - Twin dice roll determines how far a player moves along the board
 - Players must climb a vine when it is landed upon
 - Players must slide down an egg yoke when landed upon
 - If another player lands on them, that player must go back to the last yoke and slide down it.
 - If a player lands on a blue square, they can pick up a card from the action pile.  Before a player draws their card however, they must choose whether they wish to perform the action on themselves or another player (they choose which player).  An action card may have a positive (advance) or negative effect (backtrack).  

5.  List the SKILLS
None really. 

6.  Clarify the unpredictable aspects
Without the action cards, this game was purely based on chance.  To give the player choice, we added the action cards and the rule that the player must choose who the action card is to effect.  While the card effects are still random, it gives the illusion that the player has some control over their fate.  It also makes for some interesting group interactions ie. revenge, ganging up on the leader.  

7.  SCREENSHOT
The vines are green, the egg yokes are orange.  The start is at the bottom and the finish is at the top.  

During our own play test, we added more vines, yokes and blue action squares as there were some slow parts to the game board.  On completion, we were happy with the final result.  It will be interesting to see the group interactions when the other groups play it.  Until next week...