Personal Game Idea

So, it dawned on me that perhaps I was experiencing such a block in fixing the Little Monster's game play because I was too frustrated and needed to take a breather and think of something else.

I ended up coming up with a whole new random idea for a very different board game. This game would be highly adult and not in any way ever suited for children, but for adults who like to play games and drink it may very well work.

The game is called Atrocity.


A really fucked up game.

Build your own bridge of atrocities across the system and see if you have what it takes to be the most fucked up universal dictator the cosmos has ever seen!

The universe board is laid out like a race and the very end earns the winner the label of 'universe's most atrocious dictator'

Each player begins at the start of the (political) race by first figuring out if they even can achieve being in the running. There are goal points set along the way. Random words or situations will be selected from a pile. The goal is to collect the most fucked up set of things to do in order to achieve having that word or doing/stopping that situation.

Answers are subjective, voted on by other players, and winners of that round earn fucked up stars.
It is highly encouraged to drink while playing this game. The worse the ways you can do things - the closer you become to being the 'universe's most atrocious dictator'

For example: your first task is to make a universal taco day for all planets.

So the players would have to combine their cards to make a bridge of the worst possible ways they could make that happen

I started coming up with several ideas for this and showed them to my friends who loved the idea. I'm not exactly sure whether or not that means I know the only people in the world who would like this game or that it may not be a terrible game idea.

Either way, it was a good break to think of something else and I think I may continue working on this idea for the future.

Play test 2

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of this play test for some reason I cannot find on my phone. I do have a picture of the board that was used

During this playtest we asked some people from the student lobby to play our game. They kindly agreed.

We had this board, with a grid underneath, many buttons that represented humans, jewels that represented Courage, rough draft item cards, battle 50/50 dice, and a pet spinner.

It took a while to explain the rules and point system, so there was some confusion. It is clear that even though I printed the game play -- I need a clearer more concise way of explaining the rules without it being a lecture.

After bumbling through that, the game began and there was much dice rolling. There was a lot of pausing and referring to the game play to answer questions and also to have to clarify what was written on the item cards.

Finally, at the end the observations that were made were ---

1. Be consistent with the item card wording

2. Use 12 sided dice

3. The board is very large, so it's difficult to battle other players. Try to incorporate pets of item cards that make it possible to teleport, move quicker, or have battles from a distance

Original Game Prototype Opportunities

In my opinion, both of the initial game prototype ideas that I mentioned previously have a better basis and possibility for entertaining game play that the game play that we have ended up with. But since they did not seem to make the cut, I can at least explore the opportunities for challenge and play here.

Restaurant Madness:

The Challenge --- to grow your restaurant to be a shining star that can please the notorious Food Critic and run all your competition into the ground (just to make sure)!
The player would have to collect the right chefs (or level them up), the correct dishes for their theme, have the appropriate amount of tables, be able to pay for all the costs of a restaurant, avoid sabotage from others, but still be able to have a high enough combined level of things once the Food Critic appears to judge all of the restaurants.

Players can express themselves through variety of choice. They can choose their restaurant theme, their chef, their dishes, their design, their business abilities, and their morality.
 

Humans VS. Monsters:

The Challenge ----  Being the last to survive. Picking the best path, collecting items to defend your Courage, trapping opponents, or using your opponents as a shield. It would be a fine line of strategy and luck.

Players can express themselves in how they choose to play. What choices they make that affect the other players.
 

Mini Play Test 1

So, after changing the game play over and over each time we met, we also did not have a real board to play on.

I created a makeshift board out of jenga blocks for a mini-playtest to try and see just how the game could flow:

Of course, there were no squares, so we had to use our imagination. It was not the best way to try and conduct a mini-play test.

At this point, the game had changed to becoming more of a 'collecting' type board game and less of a survival game. The goal was changed from ' out-living everyone' as a human to being 'collecting all of the humans' as a monster.

So, essentially the game was the opposite from the original. In the picture, the ponies and animals represented the humans while I played the tiny Budda statue and he played the Dark Vader head.

We found that it was pretty slow to just walk around the board trying to collect humans. We had gotten rid of the initial item cards and monster cards because they no longer worked in this game, so what I learned most from this was that it was crucial to make a new and better item card deck to try and diminish the slowness of the game. So that was my next task.

Brainstorming process

The initial brainstorming process for the board game involved a lot of thought. One side of the group wanted to do a board game like our card game while the other wanted nothing to do with a game like the old one, so I had to sit down and do a lot of thinking to try and come up with an idea that wouldn't be rejected immediately.

Originally, I came up with the idea of a Restaurant style board game. The board would be divided into four sections and each section would represent a different player's restaurant. The goal of the game would be to be the most successful restaurant while driving all the other restaurants out of business and taking over their areas to expand. There would be sabotage, chef duels, a realistic money aspect, leveling up, and trying to desperately please the Food Critic.

While this idea was well met initially by one group member - and we were already working on a game design document, the whole idea was dashed the moment our group dynamic changed and the idea did not appeal to the other two group members.

It was very difficult to find a compromise between the group since everyone had very different likes and dislikes. To try and pacify the group and appeal to everyone, I then proposed the idea of a Monster Vs. Human game.

Where the basis would be that humans were trapped inside of a haunted mansion with ghosts/monsters and the entire goal would be to out-last everyone else on the board.

The idea was to have courage points as health and to try and escape being terrified by the monsters in the game while also trying to trap the other players so that they get their courage taken away instead of you.

There was a big discussion whether monsters would stay present on the board or if they would be chance card encounters. I suggested that perhaps we could do a compromise and have chance card encounters as well as have some cards be permanent manifestations onto the board and have more debilitating long term effects.

The idea was to have more and more ghosts/monsters such as that manifest on the board so that the longer the game goes on - the harder it is to keep all of your courage.

This was the initial game brainstorming process that I took notes on in my notebook.

Here are some pictures I took of that:

As you can see the 'board' is small, has limited rooms for more close-range activity. There are Item Squares as well as Monster squares.

Items can help you survive against monsters and monster cards are chance monster encounters that may or may not be bad and try to take your Courage.


The little ghost picture above is the idea of a monster/ghost manifesting onto the board during the game. It would be unable to move off of the square, but I proposed that it affect players who are caught in its line of sight. The ghost would have direction arrows (not shown) and each player's move it would turn clockwise (or counter-clockwise depending on what is described on its monster card).




Although these ideas were completely changed in favor of other ideas, these were the initial first brainstorming processes.