Week 09 - RAWR xD

In the last week of class we were tasked with creating a card game with at least 52 cards, based loosely on the rules of Bartok. Much like Magic the Gathering was influenced by Cosmic Encounter (Garfield, 539) ours was influenced by the game mechanics of Bartok. My group specifically seemed to be having a lot of issues in relation to how we would create a card game with the same sort of matching mechanism in Bartok without crossing over to a game like UNO.

In our design process, we thought it would be easiest to come up with rules, how to play, an objective and how to win if we started with a theme. I feel as if all of the first 50 ideas we had were something we were interested in, a common theme the four guys in our group had. We started with Call of Duty, there were so many possibilities with that but we got too caught up in the cards themselves that we actually were never able to get to the process of designing a game with a heavy Bartok influence. I know our first idea was essentially that each suit was a different type of weapon in the game, such that spades would be snipers, clubs are sub-machine guns and so on. Our idea was that the numbers would be certain attachments and then the faces would be used as a battle type card but we were never able to make this work as it was more of a card collecting game, while our game needed to get rid of cards.

We gave it a rest and some time to think on what we could possibly do, play some games and meet again on Sunday. I spent the entire Saturday playing Bartok on my laptop and playing other card games with my girlfriend. Some not even related to Bartok or the structure we were going for but more so that I could try to find some aspect of the game that I enjoyed and could pitch to my group.

Sunday we met and we finally nailed down a theme, Dinosaurs. After coming up with really basic rules, we were ready for class and playtesting early in the week, not sure with what we had.  Just as Garfield states while talking about playtesting, it “was like releasing a wild animal.” (Garfield, 542) We didn’t really know what we had, what to expect or how people would perceive the game.

Thankfully, our classmates were able to provide a ton of valuable feedback for a small amount of time that we were able to work on our projects. With one round of playtesting I feel as if we were able to make major changes such as what a certain card did or a new rule for face cards but I don’t feel as if we were able to make the minor changes which really affect the playability of the game with the balance of the game.