Board Game Iteration

Blog post 4

In the first week of the course I designed a board game centred around a zombie apocalypse, where players had to be the first to get to the evac zone and escape the apocalypse. The game is a basic board game where the player rolls a dice to move across the spaces to reach the end.

To make the game more interesting there were spaces where the player could pick up cards that would either be beneficial or detrimental to player progres; for example, picking up a card with a chainsaw would move the player forward 3 spaces whereas a card with a horde on it would force the player to retreat a space.
I also added in a combat aspect to the game to make it more interesting, if two or more players landed on the same square, they could decide to work together to progress faster or they could fight and one of the players would either be forced back a space or made to miss a turn.

When playing the game it became apparent very quickly that there were some problems with the game. The first problem was that with only one six-sided dice gameplay was slow as each player could not move very far forward and they were always within a square or two of each other, which meant there was no real sense of competition. The second problem was that there weren't many cards on the board so for the majority of the game the players progressed very slowly, one space at a time. The last problem that I found with the game was that the combat system wasn't very well designed so the players were constantly getting into conflict and failing to progress.

This week (week 3) I had to review these problems and try to improve the game. The first thing I improved was the board layout, I made more spaces and doubled the number of card spaces so that players could land on a card almost every turn to make progression faster and more enjoyable. I also added in spaces with 'abandoned buildings' that the player could be forced into if they got a bad result on a dice throw, these buildings could also either be beneficial or detrimental to player progression.

To make player progression faster and more competitive, I added in a second six-sided dice which meant that players had the ability to progress much further than each other, depending on the roll of the die. And the final improvement that needed to be made was the combat system. I decided to change it to a similar system to that of the combat system in 'Risk,' but instead of the players fighting each other they would have to fight a horde of zombies which would determine progression for that turn.

When I played through the game again with these modifications, it was immediately clear that they made it more enjoyable. The pacing of the game was made a lot faster by the use of two die and the extra card spaces added. The combat system has been improved significantly but it still doesn't work properly and will need more iteration before it works successfully with the rest of the game.