Game Design Journal

My idea for my board game is a world building / board building game where the players try to build the board in order to gain an advantage. Players draw cards themed around the pieces of the board, and once they have a certain number required, they can use them to "travel" to the next piece of the board and receive a souvenir. The player who travels the most and gets the most souvenirs will win the game. So, the core mechanic is using or trading in cards in exchange for a new part of the board, and each part of the board contains a souvenir from that place. The working title for this idea is "Traveller".

For this assignment, Julien and I played battleship, a game where you guess a space on the board in order to try to pick a space where the second player placed one of their ship pieces. The opposite player's board is hidden from view. The first player to sink all of the other players ships wins the game. As for an original theme, I thought that a farm theme where you're trying to sabotage your neighboring farmer's crops could work. I also had the idea of instead of battleships, the pieces were eggs, and the player would try to not  hit the other players baskets, but that ended up changing the game too much and being to complicated. First, we played a regular game of battleship, and agreed that the game felt like it dragged on a bit. So then the three changes we made to battleship in order to test the prototype were 1. make the game board smaller, 8 x 8 instead of 10 x 10; 2. to play only diagonally, and 3. to play with only one size ship instead of 4 different sizes. The ...

For my 15 minute game, I created a board with a track in the shape of an infinity symbol. The mechanics are that all players start on the same "start" space, and roll a 6 sided die in order to move their player piece. On the board, there are spaces worth 5, 10, 15, and 30 points, as well as an immediate win and an immediate lose space, and a space that reverses the direction that players move. Blank spaces were worth 1 point. The first player to 100 points or to land on the win space would win and end the game. While first playing the game with Rhea and Julien, we discovered that the win/lose spaces threatened to end the game too quickly, so I changed them into +50 points and -50 points respectively. After doing this, the game flowed much better, and I enjoyed playing it. However, with negative point values involved, there was a need for frequent adding of negative and positive numbers, and the inclusion of the single point spaces allowed for random numbers, so after play...