In this post, I am telling about the third week of the design and development process of my small-box board game. I focus on pacing the gameplay, and producing the game components.
Please make sure to read Board Game Project | W1 and W2 posts, before starting to read this post.
I wanted to make sure that the game was fully functional and fair. The distribution of colour pads on the tiles were essential for the two players to have exact chance of winning the game. The order of the colour pads on the tiles mattered. I recalculated the math and prepared an excel sheet to determine the place and amount of colours used. After determining the tiles I altered the deck of tiles in my Second Prototype and play tested the game once again. The updated deck of tiles functioned smoothly.
The tokens lengthened the play time, and I was pleased with the value day added to the gameplay, but they were not enough to pace the game. It still ended too quickly before the players were able to master the game and concentrate on the competition.
“...the best way of understand a game's pacing is to think about how the player experiences
gameplay as the story of what he did." (Selinker and Ernest, 2012)
In Kobold Guide to Board Game Design, it is stated that the first act should help new players understand how the rules of the game work, so that they approach the second act with confidence. The players will directly oppose each other in their second act struggles. In the third act, the game result is determined, and a player's success and failure in the second act should be the massive determining factor on the victory. (Selinker and Ernest, 2012)
In order to pace my game, I decided creating replayable levels similar to a digital game. It did not take much time for a player to arrive to the golden Lilly pad once, so I made it so that to win the game, a player needed to arrive to the golden Lilly pad 3 times. Each time they arrive to the golden pad, they earn a Kiss token. The Level two of the game would begin whenever a player earn a Kiss token. Tiles that are adjacent/connected to the starting tile would be removed from the game. The game would continue taking turns, until a player receives another Kiss token. Whenever a player would receive their second Kiss token, Level Three would begin. Tiles that are adjacent/connected to the starting tile, and the following tiles that were connected to this group of tiles are both removed from the game; the game would continue taking turns, until a player receives their third Kiss token (win).
I decided to produce wooden tiles for a substantial feel instead of producing them with cardboard or plastic material. Therefore, I booked a laser cutting session and prepared the graphics for cutting and etching. After the session, I dyed the tiles with multi-purpose markers.
I created the graphics for the tokens, and the artwork that will be used game box and in the rule book. I downloaded free vector image files from web and tweaked them in Adobe Illustrator.
I wanted to have nice player characters, so I spend some time looking a frog miniatures on the web to see if I can order them online, but I couldn’t find anything pleasing. So I went out to look for frog miniatures. I did not find any satisfactory options, and I ended up assembling the character pulling out the frog piece from a cup cover and cutting out the coloured base from a rubber eraser.
Citation:
Selinker, M. and Ernest, J. (2012). The Kobold guide to board game design. Kirkland: Open Design LLC.