On Monday Oct.29, Team Shapify (Alissa Rubin, Teesta Das, Yuchen Tong and I) play tested our board game with our classmates (So excited to see everyone's creativity!).
Description of the game
This is a discovery game, where the players build up a story of their wild adventure as they play! Each player, on their turn, picks a card from their hand that has a plot-point on it. One word or phrase of the plot-point is highlighted, and on their turn, the player will use a variety of colored shape pieces to build this word or phrase, and get the other players to guess it. If they are successful, they get a point and their card gets added to the plotline. The guesser also gets a point, and play moves to a new player. Build and guess as many words or phrases as possible to get the most points, and create a crazy story of your team’s adventure as the game progresses. Read the whole story out at the end!
Observations & people’s behaviors
Grabbing paper shapes is hard: it caused efforts for people to find the type of shapes they wanted out of a pile of overlapping shapes. Once they got the shapes they want, putting them on the most desired positions was also a time-consuming process. Therefore, we want the shapes in the final prototype to be easier to manipulate.
Creativity in utilizing shapes: People use different ways to complete their task -- Sometimes they used shapes as fill, other times they used them as outlines. Sometimes they overlapped the shapes to represent a combo, other times they separated shapes to show relations between objects. To keep fostering this creativity, we want the shapes in our final prototype to remain thin and flexible while being more durable.
People sometimes forgot the type of their card and picked up their card to re-check.
People were not always sure how close the word or phrase had to be to what was written on their card, and would look to us for answers. Some people we willing to be much more broad in their interpretation, and some people kept going waiting for an exact match even though the phrase was said almost exactly (verb tense may have been different)
“My disaster doesn’t have a second part!” People were confused sometimes by variation in these cards
Most people forgot to read the card type to everyone, or to read the whole card afterward
Players realized they can keep someone from winning by not guessing their word at the end, with our original rules
The excitement of building the shapes and guessing seemed slightly dampened by both players getting 1 point. Some felt this wasn’t the most fair system because it’s more stressful to build and the reward should be higher.
Ideas during game
Should we let people trade out cards in exchange for points?
Get rid of a card then grab a new one; play to a point number.
Whoever wins or gets the last card could play an ending card!
Maybe cards are separated into the categories, and you can choose from among them, or always have 1 of each kind.
Ending: 2 or 3 or so times the number of players; when you get to [12] cards, someone plays an ending card.
Changes in...
Game mechanics
We develop two versions of rules for ordinary players and advanced players. In our general version, we make the following changes:
How does the story end? We change from “when a player get rid of all her cards” to “when a certain number of story cards have been placed in the plotline”
Reward and punishment mechanism—how to be fair? How should the points be distributed? We change from “the builder and guesser each get 1 point” to
What is the sequence—in a circle, or play goes to the guesser?
Prototype
Material of shapes: We chose foam sheets as the material of shapes so they are both flexible and thin, easier to manipulate, and much more durable than paper.
Material of point tokens: We use wooden tokens to ensure that they are very durable and easy to pick for constant moving and touching.
Story cards: Instead of leaving the back of cards blank, we add the type of the card on the reverse side to offer quick-access to the prompt. Some graphic design is applied to add more visual pleasure.
Box: We got a cardboard box with small containers to contain different shapes, cards, and tokens in an organized manner. The containers also make it easier to pick up desired shapes.
We decided to sue the box lid as a canvas for building on.
Thoughts while observing
It was fun to see others playing the game, and enjoying it! It was hard not to give them directions—and we did end up giving lots of directions, because they started playing without having really read the rules and wanted to learn as they went.
It was interesting to want to make changes or try to fix loopholes or confusion in the middle of game-play. People would ask us questions, and to make the game clearer, we would have had to come up with answers on the spot.
Watching people struggle in areas was really informative, and didn’t feel bad at all.
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