Category: Uncategorized

“No Food in Studio”

The idea is from a rule of our IMA studio: “No food in the studio”. When students eat food in the studio, some professors just pop out to stop them from having their meals. However, we still try to have some food here, and the rule just adds more excitement to it. We believe that this experience is interesting enough to be made into a board game.

Game Rules:

The game includes two types of cards: item cards representing points and a spinner used to determine the scene.

One type of card is the identity card, including “Professor,” “Student,” and the “Ayi” responsible for tidying the studio.

The other type of card is the item card, including “Food” and “Project.” Only “Students” can use item cards.

The final random element is the environment, which consists of three periods: Normally, Midterm/Final, and Speaker Series.

Gameplay:

1. Before the game begins, each player draws two identity cards and three item cards. Each player starts with 5 points.
2. Players take turns playing an identity card. The identity cards are facedown to the player, so they must blindly draw one. If the identity card is a Student, the player can play an item card. They select an item card, place it in front of them, and keep its contents secret. The Professor chooses a Student and inspects the card: if the item is “Food,” the Student loses points while the Professor gains points; if the item is “Project,” the Student gains points while the Professor loses points. When a Student loses the item card in front of them, they draw a card from the top of the deck and place it in front of them (the content of this card remains hidden). The Professor can also inspect this new card in the same turn. The Ayi cannot take any actions, but when the Professor inspects a Student’s “Food” item, if there is an Ayi on the field, Ayi and Professor each receive half the points from the food. If there are additional Ayi, they equally divide the points.
3. After calculating the points, use the spinner to select the environment. During the Midterm/Final period, all Professors and Students lose points; during the Speaker Series period, all Professors and Students gain points, while Ayi loses points.
4. Before a new turn, each player replenishes their cards. Each player should have two identity cards and three item cards.
5. Each turn must have at least one Professor and one Student; if not, restart the turn.
6. The game ends when a player reaches more than 10 points or when a player loses all points.

Catan

Our first game was Catan. The random elements in the game include the initial terrain distribution and the dice rolls. As players build roads and houses, these structures cannot be changed. The randomness of the game gradually decreases, as players only need to roll certain numbers to receive relative resources if their settlements are adjacent to those numbers. The game becomes more predictable. However, the dice still introduce a bit of randomness. Additionally, the introduction of the robber (controlled by players) adds more fun to the game, making it less boring. I think this game strikes a good balance between order and randomness. Players can trade with each other to acquire resources they lack due to unlucky dice rolls.

Modern Art

My favorite game is Modern Art. It’s an auction game where players auction off their art pieces and buy others’ artworks to display in the museum. The most interesting aspect of this game is that its randomness comes entirely from the players. We engage in price bidding in different auction formats, predict opponents’ bids, and select artworks for the next auction based on the exhibit. Adjusting our strategies for purchasing artworks. In reality, hardly anyone can predict the final outcome, but everyone has a lot of fun playing it.

Hai-Alarm

This game relies almost entirely on luck. There are only two types of cards: Shark cards and Dolphin cards, and the gameplay is very simple. Each player has a “breeding ground” in front of them and can choose to cover and place cards from their hand into the breeding ground or use their Shark cards from the breeding ground to attack the covered cards in other players’ breeding grounds. If they attack a Shark, they take the opponent’s Shark card and add it to their breeding ground, and then the opponent replenishes their breeding ground with a covered card. If they attack a Dolphin, they swap these two cards. The winner is the player who has three more revealed Shark cards in their breeding ground than their opponent or has seven revealed Dolphin cards, or can reveal five Shark cards at once. Because the game replenishes cards hiddenly, it has a lot of randomness. However, because the gameplay is simple, this randomness actually brings a lot of fun. We greatly enjoy the dramatic effects brought by this randomness.

• What paths can players follow to achieve success?  What are relations between the failure and success on these paths?
• Except for the failure and success relations mentioned in this chapter,  do you experience other relations between failure and success?  
• How to design the failure for players to get fairness in the game?
• You are recommended to write this blog with the gameplay experiences you got from the game options in Assignments-2.

Players can achieve success through skill, chance, and labor. Skill is the method to solve problems and is trained from failure, as a personal improvement. This winning mechanism rewards the skill that the player learned and ignores the inequality. Chance points to luck, combining a random element to the game. Labor is the time investment to accumulate power and abilities to make it easier to achieve success. Its success only rewards efforts, instead of skills. I think these three paths are the basic relations between success and failure.

It is hard to design fairness for all players. The goal is to create a balanced experience when the players feel that their skills, effort, and decisions impact their success and failure. Combining my experience of playing “Celeste”, I think the most important point is that game mechanics should be consistent. The beginning part of “Celeste” has a feature of the fixed camera that only focuses on a room (a level), players can see the whole environment and they can consider and prepare before moving the character. However, in the later chapter, it changes the rule of fixed camera, making the game more difficult as players cannot see all traps at the beginning. This inconsistency requires more luck and time investment to achieve success, for some players like me, will consider it unfair. 

I think one good aspect is that the game allows players to choose the level of challenge. The gameplay of “Celeste” actually revolves around this idea – players have the choice of whether or not to collect the strawberries. They are not necessary for progression, but obtaining them requires more time and skillful mastery. For players who may not have as much energy to invest in the game, they can opt not to collect the strawberries, making the overall gaming experience more relaxed. On the other hand, those who collect the strawberries can see the count at the end of each level, which gives a sense of achievement. This kind of choice allows players to balance the game’s difficulty themselves, and I think it’s a great way to ensure fairness in the game.

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