Devlog Journal 5

For class this week, we continued with our board game sport and were asked to meet up with our groups again. but this week, we were asked to polish and finalize our rules for the board games we made from real-world sports. As I stated in last week's dev log, we chose to recreate the real-world game Bo-taoshi in board game form. While we were able to make the board game with no problems, I found our group not communicating as well as I thought on who was gonna do what. We really did not discuss the roles we had at all but just went with what we had. I told our group during class this week and they took the feedback very well and understood what the issue was. So we decided to give each other roles to polish and finalize our board game. I chose to playtest to see if there were any changes that were needed in the game. The other two group members focused on bringing the supplies to have others play our game during class to see how it performed and making a rulebook for the game so others could read and understand how to play the game.  Macklin and Sharp say in Chapter 8 of Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design, "Even with overlapping roles, it is important to know who is doing what to avoid potential confusion and frustration." Choosing to assign roles to each group member really did help with the communication issues we had previously. After I talked to the other 2 group members about it, we all felt like we were on the same page knowing the roles and responsibilities we assigned to each other. 

We also learned about the history of card games in class. We were then asked to play this really weird but super fun game called "Sushi Go!". The rules were simple: we play one card per turn, then pass our hands to the left and play until we have no cards left, then we count the points we have and repeat the process two more times, making the game a total of 3 rounds. The objective of the game is to have the most points possible by the end of the third round. In "Playing Card Platform" from Analog Game Studies Vol. 1, they state "What fictions, fantasies, opportunities, and design modalities do the mechanics of games spark? This issue of Analog Game Studies considers the ways that games and their mechanics  are productive of a space of creativity that breeds excitement in players and designers, alike." While I played Sushi Go! with the group I was assigned. I saw that every player in our group had sparked a different form of creativity in how they responded to the game. Some even came up with different strategies to win as well. I really liked how the cards looked and imagined that they were real when I played them. I would even say "Stand up! Sashimi!!!" to the whole group because that was my main strategy to win. Others had different strategies to win like sticking up on dumplings, makis, or puddings to win. It was really cool to see everyone's different approach to this game.

 In "Playing Card Platform" from Analog Game Studies Vol. 1, they state "Contrary to what many may think, games are never static objects. They evolve from a creator’s conception of a system and aesthetic, become physical products, and then receive commentary and corrections as they are re-published and/or discarded by the general audience." When our group played Sushi Go!, we certainly did not think that this was a static object by any means, the cards each had meanings and each combo we did with each card got plenty of reactions whether it was the pudding ruling of losing points if you had the least amount of them at the end of the game or even the wasabi tripling the value of the sushi card you played alongside it. In conclusion, we thought the game was very well thought out because it seemed to have an answer for why the cards did what they did during each game and ultimately made the game that first seemed like a static object into something that had meaning, especially if the creators of Sushi Go! put this much vision and heart into the game's rules and card artwork/format.