What's Mine is Yours

My second assignment in my game design class is to create a game of any kind within reason (card/board etc). Similar to the first one I created based on going from A to B, this game must also follow a theme.

The theme being 'What's mine is yours'

This is quite a broad and general central theme, as it could relate to scoring, counters, economy, or even gameplay. I chose to dive in with board games as I have already done one and I felt more confident in coming up with something that I could design on a visual board. Straight away I had the idea in my head that rather than having something along the lines of Monopoly where players fight for money and that would be fitting for the theme, I decided to go for the opposite of stealing... sharing.

I based my entire idea around the idea, and eventually decided that the sharing aspect would be the counter, there would be only ONE regardless of the number of players.

Once I had this idea in my head I came up with a few different game ideas such as a race to a point and be first to point X. But I couldn't think of something that would work with only one moving piece. Then I thought about a territory based game. Players would have to strategically move around a board to 'capture' territories and an end goal would eventually be reached.

This is what I came up with: 

Blue: Territory       Yellow: Chance     Red: Playable Space     Purple: Start

The basic rules to start with were: a regular D6 die, a single counter, and all four territories must be "captured". During playtesting I noticed the game was quite slow and players were getting bored, so I made some modifications to the board and the gameplay, I added more territories, I added some extra connections between the levels on the board, and I added teleporters, all by simply taping down coloured in squares on the fly to save time. I also updated my chance cards so there was a wider range of possible cards.

After the end of the day playtesting I had modified rules and a board that looked like this:

One of the common bits of feedback I got from play testing was an unclear understanding of the board, the fact that there was nothing differentiating the different blocks easily besides colours which can be forgotten for a second or two, I decided the board needed a bit more of a theme behind it. Something that would look less plain and allow players to instantly think "right thats a territory I want to go there" rather than thinking "is that a chance card? I can't remember"

So I made an excel document with different theme ideas, listing what each square could be to follow the theme

From this I had a clearer understanding of what possible themes I could try, it allowed me to easily plan out what the theme would look like and include. I decided to try Space as the first theme and this is what I created:

I then tried the pirate theme, I thought it would be pretty cool playing a board game as a pirate capturing desert islands

This is what I setlled on, it had the coolest backstory, it made the most sense gameplay wise, and it was visually clear! I haven't decided on a name yet though!