Game of the Week reflections
I’m enjoying the experience of a Game a Week, and wake up everyday, now, thinking about the current game I’m designing or the next week’s game.
I wanted to create a game that I could play with a standard deck of cards. I also wanted perhaps use one of my game design journal themes. One theme that I wanted to do was a Fish School with guppies, cods, squids, sharks, etc. So I had that in my mind as I started playing with a deck of cards. I knew that I wanted a “trash” power like in Dominion, and in my mind that was the shark’s power. But as I thought of the other card powers that I wanted, they didn’t line up with the Fish School theme, so I abandoned it for the moment and just played with a standard deck of cards.
I also thought about making the Prize Deck be powerful cards that you can add to your deck to make it better. I still think that would be a great variant, but also rejected that for this week as I wanted the game to be easier to pick up. In my first playtest of the game (with Clay Jeffreys) I had almost all of the rules as they stood, but with 2 key differences. In the original game, only 1s were available as reinforcement cards, but we found the totals were rarely separated by just 1. Also in the original write-up, you had to put 3 cards down, instead of the 1-3 cards. This complicates it because you have to decide and then reveal at the same time, vs flipping the cards when everyone had put 3 facedown cards. But I liked the flexibility of strategy for not having to put 3 cards down.
The name came from the inspiration of War, but my wife suggested Bid War, since it is not so much attacking, but bidding.
Overall, I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out and I hope my next design works out as well.
I also enjoyed playing the other participant’s games:
Other Games from Week Four
Anastasia Salter’s game [I’m enjoying the experience of a Game a Week, and wake up everyday, now, thinking about the current game I’m designing or the next week’s game.
I wanted to create a game that I could play with a standard deck of cards. I also wanted perhaps use one of my game design journal themes. One theme that I wanted to do was a Fish School with guppies, cods, squids, sharks, etc. So I had that in my mind as I started playing with a deck of cards. I knew that I wanted a “trash” power like in Dominion, and in my mind that was the shark’s power. But as I thought of the other card powers that I wanted, they didn’t line up with the Fish School theme, so I abandoned it for the moment and just played with a standard deck of cards.
I also thought about making the Prize Deck be powerful cards that you can add to your deck to make it better. I still think that would be a great variant, but also rejected that for this week as I wanted the game to be easier to pick up. In my first playtest of the game (with Clay Jeffreys) I had almost all of the rules as they stood, but with 2 key differences. In the original game, only 1s were available as reinforcement cards, but we found the totals were rarely separated by just 1. Also in the original write-up, you had to put 3 cards down, instead of the 1-3 cards. This complicates it because you have to decide and then reveal at the same time, vs flipping the cards when everyone had put 3 facedown cards. But I liked the flexibility of strategy for not having to put 3 cards down.
The name came from the inspiration of War, but my wife suggested Bid War, since it is not so much attacking, but bidding.
Overall, I’m actually fairly happy with how it turned out and I hope my next design works out as well.
I also enjoyed playing the other participant’s games:
Other Games from Week Four
Anastasia Salter’s game](http://selfloud.net/Boxes/ “Boxes”) has great prose and had me put knowledge of text-based adventure games that I haven’t played in years. You are just exploring a single room, but I know that I began to get wet eyes as more of the backstory is revealed and the small details of her husband keeping a post-it note that says “Love you =)” and the newly widowed wife dealing with the clean-up. I really enjoyed it, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the ending as I thought I had cleaned out the room. I also enjoyed some of her previous week games such as My Town , Nowhere, and Balance.
Melissa Peterson’s game Sagan is a map exploration game that I have played through, but I didn’t see an ending. I got past the biggest bad guy by using my Star-stuff, but after getting to him, it was just a dead-end, not an exit. Still impressive for a week.
Dennis Ramirez’s game is a joke about the impossibility of the IRB process (which as a non-academic, I had to ask my wife to find out that it means Institutional Review Board) with The IRB Revision Game. Yet again, I think I broke the game, because I did play this pong like game long enough to “beat” it and got my dot passed the IRB paddle on a lucky bounce, but there wasn’t a win screen and I needed to reload to continue.
Mark Danger Chen looks to be making something neat with this screenshot of his Space-based cooperative game.
