Week 2 - Designing Board Games

Second week of Game Design, the presentation of my previous assignment on Zombie Fluxx went quite well. I didn’t really get to do any sort of discussion… I’ve just signed up for Twitter and I’m still new to this whole blogging thing. So I’ll probably be able to do them next time if the chance presents itself.

This week in class we actually got to play a game on paper with numbers. It is something that’s quiiiiite familiar, and I’m a little ashamed that it fooled me. We were given a sheet of paper and had to match up with a partner. My partner was a guy named Ryan…I think? Let’s just call him that… and he actually beat me in the game. The game started with us writing the numbers 1 to 9 on the sheet of paper… At first Ryan and I had had initially written the numbers down like this:  

1 2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9

We would then select a number each and who ever had a set of 3 numbers that added up to 15 would win. The entire time I did notice something familiar but did not really clue in to it...The game’s round ended in a draw. The second round was different, I didn’t have any view of Ryan’s sheet nor did I know whether it mattered so I just selected numbers randomly due to being bored. Ryan however knew what he was doing and beat me. After the round he showed me his sheet and he had arranged the numbers in a grid like this:

Look familiar? It’s tic-tac-toe!

Anyways, following that, we were then given our homework assignments for the week… we have to make TWO board games. One we were given time in class to create. We grouped together in a team of six. Five of us were all in the same Game Development Workshop group so we were able to work together ok. We were given certain criteria to meet when designing this game. The materials we were given were a sheet of paper with a hexagon grid, these little plastic circle pieces of different colours, and those attachable erasers that you put on pencils. We used these in order to create a sort of strategy game. You’ll see what it is next time probably…

The second game we have to create is something that involves taking over territories and stuff… kinda like Risk I guess? I’ve never played Risk… I’m more of a Monopoly guy though… Ugh. Well either way, we’ve gotta get them done by next Monday’s tutorial session…I’m extremely thankful that I signed up for that 12:30pm slot… even though I barely made it last time. I guess we’ll see what happens.

Christian Perera

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