Board Game: Week 2

Monday 10th October

The group worked out more of the mechanics of how the game is to work, instead of traveling in a single route we decided to use multiple paths in order to limit how much luck is in the game, to add more skill and to make the game more exciting. After playing the existing board game Dragonology we arrived at the idea of collecting a certain amount of animal cards and returning them back into the wild to win the game. Each

Tuesday 11th October

 We then decided on the environments which will be included in the board as well as on the cards. These are, coast, river, woodland and grassland/hills. I came up with a simple design for the backs of the cards which used a picture of the environment each animal belonged to, which would help stop confusion about where the animal belongs.

Wednesday 12th October

I was tasked with coming up with questions which would be used to receive an animal card. This is the minor educational part of the game which would encourage children to be aware of animal's behaviors and traits. As these questions needed to be directed at a younger players they had to be fairly simple, yet challenging enough for them to pose some form of hindrance to the player.

Friday 14th October

We play tested the game and found it to be fairly boring with not much to do. The board did not feel quite right as it was still too linear. The group decided to rework the board spaces to include more variations of paths to make the player feel they are more in control of where they are going. We also decided to add more types of spaces including 'good luck' and 'bad luck'. Good luck spaces rewarded the player, e.g. move forward 2 spaces. Bad luck spaces penalized the player, e.g. miss a turn. We split the animal cards into tokens and abilities in order to stop confusion about when an animal ability was used up, before this it was impossible to tell what card abilities had been used and which hadn't due to the card only being discarded when it was returned to it's habitat. This meant that there were two new types of spaces, animal token, and animal ability.