Board Game Design

Chat K&N 社交恐惧牛逼症

I. Idea

The game’s idea takes from our real life experience: someone is afraid of social thing, while someone fall in love with it. In Chinese, we call it 社交恐惧症/社交牛逼症. Based on this experience, we designed a chess type game.

II. Gameplay Rule

It is a chess game for two players. At the beginning, every player will have six chess pieces: three 社恐 pieces and three 社牛 pieces. The chess board is a 8*18’s rectangle, and seperated into two sides. Players chess pieces all start at one side, and need to control their chess pieces to get to the other ends of the chess board. Once one chess piece get to the other end, the player need to ensure that at least half of their chess pieces are on the other side. Otherwise, the player lose the game.

For the moving steps, the players used one dice to decide how many steps they can move for one round. They can either spend all steps for one chess piece, or spread it to different amounts of chess pieces. This create more possibilities for the players to build different composition, and thus lead to different endings.

Since their are only two types of chess, the rule is also very simple:

1. 社恐chess can move around the chess board both forward and left and right, while 社牛chess can only move to one direction one round once the player decide on the direction in this round. 
2. When 社恐chess meet the other side’s 社恐chess, they need to exchange the position, so that they don’t need to face each other. It is called: 走为上计
3. When 社牛chess meet the other side’s 社牛chess, they both need to stay at the place for three rounds. After that, they can choose exchange the position, or move to the direction they want. It is called: 相谈甚欢
4. When 社牛chess meet the other side’s 社恐chess, 社恐chess need to get back for three steps. It is called: 退避三舍
5. By “meet”, it means that when A chess is on B chess’s left cell, right cell, or the cell in front of B chess, all of this condition means A chess meet B chess.

III. User Test and Comments

We played it for three to four rounds and completed our rules during the user test. The version above is the most proper rule we could build right now. This version’s rule allow the players to think carefully to win the game or prevent the other player from winning. Also, it has some small rules for the players to find, such as you always need to leave one 社牛chess at home, so that it can prevent the other player’s chess to get to the end of the chess board. All in all, I would say this game is fun and full of emergent game experience, but also lack of the long-term players: People will find the best strategy after 2-3 rounds, and will get bored of it. But at least it is fun at the beginning 🙂