Devlog 12

This week we played a few different Disney board games and were assigned our final project with the groups that we were playing the board games with. The game that my group played was called Haunted Mansion, inspired by the Disney movie of the same name of course. I believe the learning point we were intended to understand here was to see different methods of play in board games beyond just dice rolls and luck. Also, of course, to get more familiar with reading and understanding new rules for a game that we are unfamiliar with to help us with our own rule-writing. Returning to beyond dice, however, Haunted Mansion works on an “Action” System, where essentially players get to perform three separate actions on their turn, which felt like it almost completely removed reliance on luck for success from the game. I was a big fan of this because I could very specifically plan what I was going to do on my turn. These actions were Move, Rotate, Collect, Discard, and Duel, each of which was explained on each player’s character cards in a similar way to “Innovation” in Soren Johnson’s presentation, although the “cognitive load,” as he says, of understanding these actions is not nearly as large in Haunted Mansion (Johnson How Board Games Matter). The only really random elements of the game, Haunt, Ghost, and Event Cards, always served to change how I thought about my strategy as a player. These bits of randomness and luck were delivered through what Johnson calls Pre-Luck, a kind of “random event that happens in the game that allows the player to make a decision or action based on that result” (Johnson). This basically meant that I felt like every turn and round mattered because they were fresh, different, and most importantly not permanent. By this I mean that if I had a plan, I had to act on it as soon as possible because another player could steal the Ghosts I wanted or the Event card next round could change what I was able to do within my turn. To expand on the randomness, as the player I never felt like I was unable to control how my turn went and only counted on luck to enhance my experience or present to me new opportunities to take and strategies to create. To relate this idea to Soren Johnson’s speech, this kind of randomness creates transparency with the players and affects their decision making for the round going forward (Johnson). “Transparent, visible mechanics increase player comfort.” (Johnson).

To the second point, getting further experience reading and understanding unfamiliar rules, the rules for Haunted Mansion were immaculately clear and descriptive. They left nothing to the reader’s own interpretation and explained every fine detail of the game mechanics, even making sure to define some of the things that might have seemed pretty self explanatory on their own. This is definitely something I can take and incorporate to improve my own rule-writing in the future. In the Travel Game Project there were some things that I didn’t think to write down because to me as one of the game’s designers they felt simple to understand, however, once we got to the playtest there were questions brought up about those exact same things. Questions that specifically could have been answered by the rules had I thought to include those things. I applied this when I was writing the rules for our second project and it seemed to have improved our playtest results by a very large amount. The rules also included theoretical examples about how a confusing part of the game could be played out, further adding to my ability to comprehend exactly what the designers intended to happen.