Devlog 6

This week we began discussing a few of the broader formats that card games fall into from the design end. Basically what the game designers are thinking they want their game to end up looking like, accomplishing, or just the general experience that they want to create for the players. A few of the ones we talked about were Shedding, Trick-taking, Exchange, and Matching. We also started playing some card games that were new to most of us, Exploding Kittens and The Crew: Quest for Planet Nine, with the focus of seeing how their rules are written and analyzing what rule-writing methods are employed most effectively. Exploding Kittens is basically a Shedding style game where players take turns playing and drawing cards while hoping to not draw the Exploding Kitten card, which eliminates them from the game. Most of the cards have special effects written on them, allowing players to do special actions when playing them. As the drawing pile gets smaller and smaller, the chance to draw an Exploding Kitten gets greater and greater. The game ends when there is one player remaining and everyone else has been exploded. The Crew is a bit more complex than Exploding Kittens. The rulebook was incredibly easy to understand because it wasn’t overly long or hard to look at. It had a very clear “Summary, Setup, Sequence of Play, and End of Game” sections, as well as many “Example” illustrations sprinkled throughout to help the reader visualize what this part of the rules are talking about and how it will look during play (James Ernest). 

The Crew is a trick-taking game which has players working together to successfully complete tricks with very limited information. The hardest hurdle to overcome when I was learning this game, and trying to help the rest of my group to understand it, was that The Crew is not a competitive game. It is a teamwork game where players need to work together to succeed and not just play the highest card you have to win the trick. The game doesn’t end with an individual winner, but by players completing all the tricks in the Logbook, that increase in difficulty the further in players get. If players fail a trick, they have to reshuffle and start the trick over. Once I understood how The Crew works, it was really fun to help my group to understand how to play and seeing how much we could complete.

Moving forward in class, we are beginning our group project to create our own card game from scratch with a central theme around general traveling. This sort of fulfills the basic part of Conceptualizing our game or “developing an idea for the game and its play experience” (Macklin and Sharp Ch 9). Traveling is just the basic idea, it is up to our groups to figure out the play experience and everything after that. Between now and next class we were asked to brainstorm a lot of ideas with our group and narrow down to a few that we believe are the strongest. Macklin and Sharp have a list of objectives for brainstorming that I really like and I will keep it in mind when I am brainstorming ideas with my group. This list, “Quantity over quality, Defer judgment, no buts (just ands), Go wild, Get visual, and Combine Ideas,” very basically says to come up with as many ideas as you can, stay as open-minded as possible, and embrace others ideas to give everyone the best chances of finding something that sticks (Macklin and Sharp Ch 9).