Meet Unfortunate Shapes! A casual board game that's made for the sake of your creativity.
How do you like board games? Even more exciting than playing one, in this 3-week game making project kicked off on Oct.22, my teammates Alissa Rubin, Teesta Das, Yuchen Tong and I are asked to make our own game!
1. Concept ideation
Provided with the prompts, we picked Gestalt theory and "Discovery" as the inspiration of our game. Not surprisingly, we started to brainstorm around shapes -- the very basic elements Gestalt principles deal with. The brainstorming phase was very much like a kindergarten handcraft class. We cut out shapes out of paper and post-its, played with them and thought about the possible mechanics: What's the relations among shapes? How about the space among them? The process was super fun and we went from block building to jigsaw puzzle to Russian-roulette. At the end of the first week, we settled down on the idea of a shape-building quiz -- we were all intrigued by the flexibility and possibilities in building something by those post-it pieces. And moreover, what stems from the possibilities and flexibility -- what the heck are you building? ("Seriously, where are the ears of this cat?")
2. Play testing
In the second week, we reunited with a working paper prototype and a more structured set of rules. We named our group and the board game "Shapify". This is a game for 3+ people, where players will grab three cards with "plot-points" on them from the communal deck in the beginning. They then take turns to build the "plot-point(s)" described on one of their cards and the rest will guess what this player is building. If someone gets the right answer, both the guesser and the builder will get points.
A crucial formal element of our game is the story cards with "plot-points". We introduced 4 categories and wrote a bunch of exciting stories for each of them:
Environment (such as 'forest')
Situation(weather, atmospheric events, acts of God)
Shelters (such as 'treehouse', or maybe 'gingerbread house'?)
Disaster Strikes ( These have 2 plot-points on each card. Win 2 bonus points for guessing the second word and averting catastrophe!)
On Monday Oct.29, we game tested it with our classmates (So excited to see everyone's creativity!). A detailed documentation and reflection of our game testing session can be found here. It explains the decision we made upon winning goals, game variables, scoring system, object materials, and colors etc.
3.Iteration
After the game test, we refined our rules and below is the final official description of "Unfortunate Shapes":
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!
Objective of the game:
Build and guess as many words or phrases as possible to get the most points. Create a crazy story of your team’s adventure as the game progresses, and read the whole story out at the end!
A complete player manual can be accessed here.
4. Final prototype
This phase was both extra fun and challengeable. We had a long discussion about materials for our shapes -- according to our play-test, people loved the flexibility of paper but they were hard to grab and not durable in the long run. How to better distinguish different shapes is another challenge we faced. Should we rasterize the materials using a laser cutter to make patterns? But it takes time. Should we directly use color materials like plastic sheets? Then they are not laser-cuttable. Cost-efficiency is also a dimension to consider. Below are the options we identified from the materials available at ARCH:
Base:
Acrylic ($24)
Plywood ($6.7)
Museum board($22) or chipboard($3)
Colorful foamies ($0.6, need no topping, not laser-cuttable)
Topping:
Laser cutting rasterization for decorative patterns Pro: Looks neat and artsy. Con: Takes too much time.
Stick colorful vinyl on the base Pro: Looks neat and colorful. Con: Take extra time cutting and sticking.
Glue color felt on the base. Pro: Have a cozy, organic touch. Con: The edges will be rough.
Eventually, we decided to use colorful foamies for our shapes; got ourselves a nicely gridded box from Michael's that can hold all the shapes, tokens, cards and the user manual; and laser-cut a lid slash play-board for our box. For visual pleasure, we also add some colorful graphic design to the cards. Below are the pictures of us making the prototype that really looked like a kindergarten craft class, which means fun.
Cutting shapes
Laser-cutting the wooden lid
Examples of cards files, two-sided.
There were also some trivial but good-to-learn challenges:
Book laser cutter the moment you plan to have a laser cut! We are just lucky to have one hour next Monday by the time we booked it on Wednesday.
Study the characteristics of materials: the elastic thickness of foamies make it hard to cut them perfectly. There's always some tiny details about materials that you won't know until you have your hands on them.
5. Takeaways
A big takeaway from this game-making project is that, for a game, it is very important to ensure the key formal elements are sophisticated enough so they well-support the game dynamics, facilitate players to achieve the game objectives and offer fun (slash challenges, slash conflict).
For instance, story cards serve as the propeller of our whole game, while shapes are the planks of the boat. And this explained why in the playtesting session, a big proportion of problems we came across were about these two formal elements.
We have to tweak the story cards from both content and format aspects so that the variables (number of cards and plot-points on hands, number of cards to complete the gameplay, point tokens), dynamics(that there's no dominant object or strategy) and the relationship between players (the conversation, either spoken or silent between builder and guesser) is well-balanced.
As for the shapes, we learn a lot about the affordances of materials: soft materials afford more flexibility and overlapping; rasterization affords craftsmanship and a sense of "classy"; color affords playfulness; thickness affords endurance... One thing I would like to practice in next project involving material choice is a "material matrix": Listing all the pros and cons of possible materials will definitely provide a more comprehensive view and guide smart combinations.
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