Week 12- Trying to be transparent

This week we have started our final board game project in class and due to this, we are studying transparency. You can tell if a game has transparency by seeing how much strategy is needed to play the game. For example in Watch It Played’s video Zombie Dice, you play as a zombie trying to get as many brains as possible by randomly drawing three dice from a bag to represent your prey and rolling them. There are three different colored dice with three different pictures on them, a brain (for human brains), a spiked circle (for a gunshot), and footsteps (for running away). The three different colors are green, for easy weak humans, yellow, for mediumly difficult humans, and red for tough humans. Now at first rolling dice would seem non-transparent with pure luck and you’d be right, however, Zombie Dice adds in some Pre-luck to even the scale. Pre-luck happens when you take a chance of luck, in our case rolling the dice, and then reacting and taking an action afterward. After you’ve rolled you have a decision to make, any dice that landed on the brain side represent the brains you’ve collected and go towards you’re point system, however, if any one of the dice lands on a footstep side you have the option of either writing down the points you have known or grabbing three more dice from the bag and rolling again to try and collect more brains. However there is a catch, the last side of the dice, the spiked circle representing a gunshot, counts against you so that if you roll three gunshots within your turn you lose all the brains in said turn that you had collected. This allows the player to make a strategic decision, do they roll again to try and collect more brains to have a better chance at winning the game, or do they play it safe and collect what they have now so as to not lose it, this is what game transparency is. The three gunshot dice stick to the back of a player's mind and hold weight to every roll and decision they make. However, one could argue that the game itself relies too much on Pre-luck and a player can win entirely by chance due to having good rolls, these are the kind of things my group and I will have to think about when creating our board game.