Week 11- Card or Discard? That is the question

This week my group and I created a Halloween discard-themed card game. Taking from James Ernest’s Writing Effective Rules, although not in the order the author intended, my group and I were able to create a well-adjusted game by the end of the school week. We have first given a components list “any physical components of the game, and describe anything special about them”- Writing Effective Rules, page 3. As mentioned before we had some class requirements set before even discussing our game. One we had to have at least 52 cards, two the game had to be a discarded game, and three it had to have a spooky theme. So after deciding to go with the art of trick or treating for our card game we then started with an old 52-card deck I had in my game supply bag and split the cards into two different groups, point cards, and specialty cards. We then worked on our summary, which “sets the stage and tells the players what to expect”- Writing Effective Rules, page 2. We knew the main goal of our game was for the player to try and collect as many candies as they could, much like you would when you actually trick or treat. However, trying to incorporate a strategy was a little difficult, one of my teammates suggested that our specialty cards could be used as actions for our players to gain more candy by stealing from another player. But we couldn’t just add in some steal cards and call it a day because playing the only action you have isn’t a strategy. In the end, we added around 15 more cards, which included stealing candy block cards, splitting the deck into three different decks, and adding tokens. My main job in all of our development was to work on coloring and clarifying our two types of specialty cards. Clarification is like a bottom wood piece in a Jenga stack, it’s small, and you don't notice it, but if removed the whole tower comes crashing down. ”If there are numerous game terms to define, strange exceptions to the rules, corner cases to be explained, or unanswered questions that don’t fit into the main body of the rules, you can call them out in a section like this”- Writing Effective Rules, page 6. At the beginning of development my wording of our action cards confused our players, using words such as “loose three pieces of candy” made them think the person who drew the card lost. So by just rewording the cards to all say “take three pieces of candy from an opponent of your choice” helped fix this problem immensely.