Post #8: Game 3 Postmortem

 Game 3 Postmortem

Gentlemen’s Dash

Group 7

Game Summary

Gentlemen's Dash is a racing card game about balancing speed for style. In this game you play as a scientist racing against an opponent scientist to get first in line for the money grant offered by your local academy. However, being first does not guarantee you the grant, you must still conduct yourself as a proper gentleman in order to earn their favor. Go too fast and you risk losing to your opponent building up more points than you, go too slow and you risk missing out on the large finish line bonus. 

Target Audience

Player Types: Casual Players, Strategists, and Competitors

Player Interaction Pattern: Player vs. Player

Age Range: 5+

Appeal: This game really only requires the ability to do basic arithmetic, or simple counting, and can be played anywhere where it is feasible to lay out cards and maybe have a scrap of paper to help keep score. The game takes very little preparation, and requires few resources, most of which are extremely common. Finally, it is never perfectly clear what the best strategy is. Now that the game includes the optional Playing with Style rule, players can pull ahead when they are far behind just by playing with a bit of foresight. 

Problems Encounters

As with all the games I’ve been working on, the biggest issues were clearly and concisely conveying the rules. I wanted to make sure that our players had all the most important rules front-loaded and easy to find, but make sure that any rule could be located easily. If I were to bring this game into a more professional context, I would be redesigning the rulesheet into a small rule booklet, and arranging the graphics so that as many could fit on the page while the rules were readable. 

The other big issue is that we really didn’t get to see as much player feedback as I would have liked. It is also especially hard to get meaningful feedback when people are forced to play my game, and when they are tired and overburdened by school. This was just not the best environment to get the critical feedback that our game needs to be fully refined. However, given the circumstances, I like to think that we made the most of it, and so far we have received very little negative critiques on the actual fun-factor of the game. 

Task Completion

I feel that me and my partner were good about sharing the workload. I will confess that since I conceived of the game, I probably took a greater share of the work simply out of passion, but I was aware of this and made sure that I did not leave him out. He not only provided helpful assistance in designing the game, but also made many valuable contributions which made the game as compelling and strategic as it is. He also provided many of the examples used to ensure players had a good idea of what they needed to do. I have been very lucky to have such a responsible partner. 

Design Solutions

Our game was already working pretty well, but in the beginning crossing the finish line was simply a matter of getting 50 meters or more. My partner suggested that we make it so the players had to get exactly 50 meters, and it was only the first to do so that got the finish line bonus. This was a major improvement as it gave more value to the slower meter-value cards. My initial concern was that the faster cards would always be better, so in addition to this rule I also included an optional rule called, “Playing with Style.” This allowed players to receive additional bonus points if they played certain cards in a row. These little opportunities could be chained together to give a player just enough of an edge where they could beat someone who got to the finish line first. My only concern now that there is still an edge case I have not tested where the players tie, then tie again, and don’t have any rules that explicitly resolve the final tie. Despite that, our game has proven to work how it was intended to. Most of the games we witnessed result in the players being neck-and-neck, where there is not much more than a 3 point difference. This encourages players to try again, now that they understand the game a bit better. 

Game Development Going Forward

While there are plenty of areas of my game design and game development process that I could improve on, I can think of two major ones that stand out. The first is incorporating more visuals into the rulesheet. This would be even better if I used tools specifically designed to make stylish presentations, so that I could include more graphic and word content on a page without overcrowding things. The second is to seek out bigger groups of playtesters who will be able to provide more realistic criticism for my games; giving me more data points to help improve it.