My group members and I had to build a board game for a school project. We were given the themes horror, political, and for a 40+ audience. We came up with about eight general ideas and settled on a game set during the moon landing. Our game is called "Red Luna" and is about Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reaching the moon, only to find out Russian space dogs have reincarnated themselves to help the Russians build a nuclear launch site on the moon. We settled on this theme because it was a given that the ages forty and older would find it funny and interesting, this was important because the age range was, in our opinion, the most difficult requirement to meet.
The game is played with a serious of cards on the table, and you "explore" the moon by moving across these cards and flipping them over. Each card hides something underneath it, presenting various tasks and conflicts to deal with. Buzz and Neil have different abilities and inabilities, forcing them to work together to fully complete the objective. The objective is to kill all four ghost dogs in order to destroy the nuclear launch site before the doomsday timer completes (four minutes).
Not many problems were encountered during development, it was a relatively smooth process. One notable problem simply testing all of the possibilities for our game. As elements were added and taken away, it became harder to know what would and wouldn't work, but this only required us to test the game often. We only made one change to the game before we tested again, allowing for a very experimental process, we could see exactly what was good and bad for the game. This strategy proved effective, although on a larger project, like a video game or more complex board game, this level of testing can quickly become difficult, expensive, and maybe impossible.
We managed the project in two different pieces, my partner handled on paper recordings, such as play tests and the rule sheet, where I handled the physical board game pieces and functionality. On my side I know there was many revisions to get the pieces perfect. I had to make sure they weren't invasive and easy to use, each piece had to complete its task perfectly and also communicate itself to the player so that the game was as intuitive as possible.
The only thing I would change is shooting for a bigger idea, I like how this game turned out, but after playing it so many times I know all of the outcomes. Next time I want to make a more dynamic game that lasts longer and includes more decisions to be made. In this development process I think we limited our scope and underestimated our ability, next time I think its possible to make a bigger game and to not restrict myself as much.
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