3: Prototyping

Core Mechanics: Hand Management, Race, Grid Movement, Interrupts, Rock-Paper-Scissors

Our prototype began with a very humble concept. Two players start the game with their playing pieces on the opposite side of a 8×8 square board. Both players begin by drawing 1 card and the player with the highest card goes first. They use a filtered deck containing aces, twos, and threes to move their pieces across the board. Each suit of the card determines your direction of travel, with each of the 4 cardinal directions corresponding to one of the four suits. The goal is to get your piece to the other opponents start position first. We started with this concept and by the end of the session realized that while the game was functional, it was also really boring.

So for session 2 we focused on adding mechanics that introduce more conflict to the player. Enter face cards: we shuffled the 16 face cards into our filtered deck and gave each a purpose. Kings reversed the direction of movement for the board when played, queens allowed you to set a directional trap for the player on the board (represented by an arrow), jacks allowed you to sabotage an enemy player by skipping their turn. We also added a hand system in which during each turn, the player draws 3 cards and chooses to play one card from their hand to play. At the end of each players turn, they discard their 3 cards and redraw. For added fun, we also increased the size of the board to 10×10. The game was starting to take shape into something much more entertaining and it was here that I started to see the flaws in some of the most recently added mechanics.

By the last play session some of the flaws were beginning to show. My partner and I reached a situation where one player was in “checkmate”, unable to move their piece because the other player received multiple queens and essentially trapped their opponent. In hindsight, it really wasn’t smart to allow an unlimited amount of traps in play. So we added a rule that each player can only have 2 traps on the board. We also realized that re-drawing 3 cards for each player every turn really wasn’t that fun. So we instead decided that players would instead draw a single card every turn after playing one, while still maintaining a maximum hand of 3 cards. During this third play session, we also ran into a situation where the deciding draw for who should go first was a tie between both players! So we decided rock-paper-scissors would be the tie-breaker for which player takes the first turn if both of their drawn cards are of the same value.

Having finished the third session, I’m left with a more refined version of the original prototype. There is an elegance in the simplicity of this game that I really enjoy. While it’s not my favorite game ever, I had a lot of fun making it and even more fun sharing it with others. I look forward to potentially improving this prototype in the future and sharing it with others.