Week 07

“One who are we, two how do we win, and three why will this be fun?”- How To Teach Board Games Like a Pro. The previous quote is from the Youtube video How To Teach Board Games Like a Pro by Shut Up & Sit Down, and is considered the three most important questions to answer when explaining a new game to a group of people. However I also find these questions important for creating a game as well. For my Game Design class this week we learned how to play and teach others how to play social deduction games, these kinds of games cause the players to think and figure out who is what. For example in the game Werewolf, at least one person is a Werewolf while everyone else is a villager, the villagers don’t know who the Werewolf is so by using social deduction and context clues the villagers try to find out who is the Werewolf before their all “un-alive” in game form. If I want to make my own social deduction game I must first figure out who everyone is, how they win, and why my game is fun. I’m going to base my game on the style of an alien body snatcher within a family unit. Each person will be given a card that includes a personality and relationship, for example one person's card might say Mother: It’s wine O’clock somewhere. While one person from the group gets a card that just says Alien with a task on it, for example Alien: You must find the Mom and take her back to the ship alive. Stating the Mom has to be alive will help create a constraint for the alien, a constraint is “putting limits on player actions and interactions with the objects, other players, and the playspace with the intention of creating a play experience.”- Macklin and Sharp, Chapter 2. Basic Game Design Tools. The alien will be allowed to un-alive one player each round but they, along with everyone else, do not truly know who’s who and may accidentally un-alive the person they need to abduct and fail their mission. To find out who’s who the players will create conversations with each other as their set characters and try to find the alien while also trying not to reveal themselves in the process. These conversations are made to hopefully cause a challenge, “The resistance a game puts in the way of a player in their attempt to achieve a goal, or through the difficulty of a game’s content or subject matter.”- Macklin and Sharp, Ten Tools, Glossary, in a humorous way as I have seen in previous social deduction games.