Week #7: 2-Player Board Game - The Rat Pack - From Version 0.1 to 0.2

  CAGD - 170 - 1 - Video Game Design

Week #7: 2-Player Board Game - The Rat Pack - From Version 0.1 to 0.2

Group: 11

Game Summary

Our game is based on a Stealth-based Baking theme game, aimed at college students. In this game you play as a squadron of rats in a bakery trying to gather as much food as you can without being caught by the head chef. Each player has access to a number of routes, and a number of different rats to choose to send out to gather food. The player with the most food by the end of the game wins.

Update v0.1 

In the first version of our game we started with just the themes Stealth Baking for College age players. Some of our first ideas consisted of rats in a pizzeria running around stealing ingredients to make pizzas. As part of the project was the restriction that we could not use a shared game board, and instead could have player boards, we had thought that the player boards would look like a pizza and you would assemble the ingredients on it. This sounded neat in concept, but became too difficult to actually conceptualize. 

I had come up with a simpler idea that involved at least two choices per turn, gather or bake, where gather would have you attempting to gather ingredients at the risk of being caught, and bake would be where you spend your ingredients to make a pizza. The score was going to be based on the value of all your pizzas added up, minus any remaining ingredients. We ended up not going with this idea. My teammates felt more inclined toward a card-based game that involved choosing from a roaster of different rat types. This new version had at least three different rat types, each with two different stats, and a name. We had plans to give each rat special abilities, but agreed that that would add a bit too much complication for the first prototype. We also added three routes that our rats could take, which took the form of a track or ladder, and the rats would progress up the route based on their "move" stat. Each turn a player would choose between moving, abandoning the track and bringing home the food they had collected, or attempting to sabotage another player. Moving on the track had the risk of being caught, as you would have to make a stealth check every time you passed a check point on the track. The player with the most successfully collected food at the end of a certain amount of rounds, won the game.

Update v0.2 

Before we migrated over to version v0.2, we had already playtested the game, which greatly improved our rulebook, however we still had missed a lot. In our second playtest, there were a number of rules that we hadn't even mentioned, or that were poorly worded. A lot of mechanics that we took for granted, needed to be more thoroughly explained, and other parts of our rulebook were just a bit too wordy, and not very concise. We also realized that the rules were not in the best order for someone just getting started with the game. We had our turn order before even mentioning things like food, and rat cards, and a number of critical components of the game. 

Overview

There is still a lot of work to do on our game. We are hoping to add more rat cards and specials for those rats soon, to add more variety and uncertainty to the game. Right now we have everything on a static player board which can be printed out and marked up with a pen or pencil, but I believe what we want to do is have the players print out and cut out cards to be physically moved around. 

I am hoping that we can still keep our game simple enough where the rules don't need to exceed three pages. Two pages would be more ideal, but I have my doubts about being able to keep it that compact.