[INTERMEDIATE] Main Quest: Ideas

If you have designed one or more complete games before but still do not feel like you are a strong game designer, follow this set of constraints.

Come up with ideas for creating a board game, card game, or tile-laying game (that is, it must either have a board, cards, or tiles as physical components). It may have more than one of these components, and it may involve additional components beyond these (such as dice or pawns). You may choose any theme you want, as long as it is original – do not use an existing IP (intellectual property). In short, if your work would violate someone else’s trademark or copyright, don’t do it. You will undoubtedly work with other people’s IP at various points in your own career; take the opportunity now to do something original with your ownIP.

I’m going to place two more restrictions to help you. First, you may not make a trivia game, or any other game that relies on large amounts of content (such as Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Apples to Apples, or Cranium). This is purely for the purpose of keeping your scope limited; if you have to generate 250 cards with unique trivia questions on them, it will leave you far less time for playtesting the game mechanics. I would put Trading Card Games (like Magic: the Gathering and Pokemon TCG) in this category as well, since it requires so much time to create a large number of cards.

Second, you may not use “roll-and-move” mechanics in any form. Do not throw dice and then move a pawn around the track. Do not use a spinner or a teetotum or card draws or any other random-number-generating device to determine what a player does on their turn. There are several reasons for this prohibition. First, the mechanic is highly overused, and it is practically impossible for you to make a game that will not feel like a clone of Monopoly, Trouble, Sorry!, Chutes & Ladders, or any of the other myriad games that rely on this as their core mechanic. Second, the mechanic essentially makes the key decision each turn for the player, so the game is making interesting decisions but the player is not. By divorcing player intentionality from the game’s outcome, you usually end up with a game that is not particularly fun to play (no matter how fun it is to design).

In addition, you must:

• Design your game such that it has a strong embedded narrative that is interactive in some way. You will have to think of ways to tell a story through the player actions of a board game, and how to integrate narrative and game mechanics. If you are interested primarily in RPGs or other forms of storytelling, do this.
• Create a purely cooperative board game for two or more players, so that everyone wins or loses as a team. This is challenging for several reasons. The game must provide systems that are the opposition, since the players do not provide opposition to each other. Cooperative games generally have a problem where a single skilled player can direct all of the other players (since everyone is cooperating, after all), leading to an MDA Aesthetic where most of the players are bored because they are just being told what to do by another player. If you are interested in the social dynamics of games, choose this.
• Make a two-player head-to-head game with asymmetry: the players start with unequal resources, positions, capabilities, and so on… and yet they are balanced even though they are quite different. These games are not so hard to design the core rules for, but they are very difficult to balance. If you are interested in the technical and mathematical side of game design and game balance, try this.
• Create a game to teach any topic that is normally taught at the high school (pre-college) level. It is up to you whether to teach a narrow, specific fact or a broad concept. The challenge here, of course, is to start with a fun game and not have the focus on education get in the way of that. If you’re interested in “serious games” (games that have a purpose other than pure entertainment), then do this project.

ONE IDEA PER POST. Feel free to post up to 3 ideas.

After you have posted, read two (2) other posts in this discussion and offer constructive analysis and critique. Your feedback can be helpful during the design process.

Please select the Main-Quests folder when posting your initial post and include hashtag #Intermediate.