Board Games

Monday 27th Sept

Today we were given our brief for the board games project, we will be working in our teams (Jak, Jake, Phil, Reece, Ryan and myself) to research design and create a prototype of our own boardgame. We spent the afternoon playing existing board games and deciding what made each game good or bad.

Pass the Bomb
The first game we played was called "Pass the Bomb" made by Gibson games and the game consisted of cards showing two or three letters and a "bomb" you could hold. It took everyone a little while to understand the game (the instructions had been lost!) however, we finally worked out how to play. One person started with the bomb and had to think of a word that used the letters on the card they had played, then the next person would think of a word and pass it on and so on. The bomb had a spontanious timer so whoever was holding the bomb when it "went off" (a rubbish sound effect that was difficult to hear) they would have to keep the card, and start a round again with a new card. The object of the game was to be the player with the least amount of cards.
We all enjoyed playing the game, even though we didnt win, and thats something we decided we wanted our game to be like. It was fast paced and you had to think on your toes so no one was waiting around for too long like some other board games. The random timer on the bomb was a good idea because we never knew when it was going to "go off" which built anticipation, and the cards had a good varitety of difficulty so it wasnt always too easy or too hard.

Blockus 3D
The next game we played was much easier to understand, however, only 4 of us could play. The aim of the game was too stack your coloured blocks and have the most blocks showing from a birds-eye-view. This was also fun to play and even though it looked like certain people would win, in the end, the underdog won, so there is never a clear winner. We played this game fairly casually, not thinking to much where we put our blocks, but it can be played with strategy so it would suit older age groups as well as children.

Evolutions
This was the next game we picked out, it was basically trivial pursuit but with extremely hard questions, we had a flick through the cards and couldn't find many that we would have known the answers to so we decided not to play. This would be good game for older generations or very clever people, like Stephen Fry, because they would find it challenging yet  have the abilty to answer some of the questions. This made us realise that we need to make our game easy enough to play, yet still be challenging.

Ghettopoly
When picking this game out, we chose it purely out of humour, and to see what this original monopoly had in comparison to the millions of other monopoly board games. We thought this would be a funny game to play as we fought over who would get the play as the "Pimp" and tryed to figure out what the "rock" was meant to be. However, the bombardment of steriotypical racism put us off the game quickly. As we tried to figure out who would want to play a game like this, we came to the conclusion that they probably wouldnt want to play monopoly in the first place, so we had to ask who was this game aimed at? This made us realise, when making our game, we really need to think about our target audience.

Steeple chase
This was the last game we played, it looked fairly old in comparison to the other games we had been playing. This was the most boring game we played, the object of the game was to roll the dice and move your horse around the board, shaped like a race track. The winner won purely on luck, so it didnt feel very satisfying to play.

The game we enjoyed most was Pass the Bomb, and the interactivity of it and so decided this was the way we wanted to go with our game. The other games also made us realise we must think about who our target audience will be and make this as wide as possible. We also want to make sure our game is enjoyable and not to hard to understand, without being dull and boring.

Our first idea for our game is similar to pass the bomb, however, rather than making words, you are given lyrics from songs on the cards and have to finish the lines.