Devlog Journal 14

For class this week, we continued creating our board game for our final board game project. We decided to make a board game based on the cover art of the cartridge that we chose from a fake online game library. This week, we were asked to have a version of our board game that was supposed to be playtested on Thursday so that our group could get some consultations from others and our professor himself. We came up with the point system of our game and had the rules of the game and the design of the board fall together afterward. To get a better idea of what our group should have had to playtest on Thursday, I watched Geoff Engelstein's Board Game Design Day: White, Brown, and Pink: The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness.

Here are some takeaways from the video:

(2:00) - Geoff starts out by quoting Greg Costikyan by saying that uncertainty is essential to make a game, if there is no uncertainty of what the outcome might be, there is no reason to play. Geoff focuses on randomizers, which include a spinner, which is what we are using to determine what the player can do with the board to gain points in the board we are creating for our final board game project. We get more insight from Geoff later in the video by explaining what input randomness is.

(6:10) - Geoff explains that input randomness is simply the decision you make from a random roll. Geoff used the example of backgammon and how you make your decision on how to move your pawns on the board after you roll the die, as a result, it changes the game state for your opponent. We included input randomness in our board game by having a randomized "roll" on each turn and having players decide what they would do on their turn based on the "roll" they got to get as many points as possible by collecting the most constellations.

(9:40) - Geoff explains how input randomness can lead to the players having a more strategic feel to the game, can the players feel like tehy have more control in what they do in the game, and rewards more skillful play to the players who put more effort into understanding and mastering the mechanics of the game. We wanted our game to feel that there is a sense of control because the theme of the game was to be about astronomers who were discovering constellations, and I would certainly say that a game with more input randomness than output randomness is better suited for a game with a theme like the one in our board game.