Blog Post 3: Prototyping
The board game I prototyped is called "The Purpose of The Domino". It is played with a few different game pieces, and a set of double 6 dominoes. It is a positional strategy game where you try to capture the gold pieces. The main mechanics from boardgame geek would be action points and square grid. There are a variety of actions that can be taken on a turn. To make it even more exciting, each player's hand of dominoes can affect the specific squares the domino corresponds to. Being adjacent to enemy pieces, ally pieces, and gold pieces all confer different advantages.
In the first version of the game, each player could take only one action on their turn and the domino would correspond to an extra action if the domino affected the square of the first action. However, this version quickly became stale as repetitive patterns were beginning to form. For example, a player would play a piece on their turn just to be attacked on the next turn. At the time, the rules were getting more and more complex to disallow such behaviors to try and make the game more interesting, but it became overwhelming quickly. In addition, the game felt extremely slow paced and boring.
In the second version of the game, I came up with the idea to roll a die to see how many actions can be played in one turn. This made the game much more exciting, as it left a lot of power up to chance while still allowing strategic decisions. However, there were still some complex rules limiting what actions you could take on the same turn to avoid extremely oppressive plays from happening, and players were easily confused by what was and wasn't allowed.
In the third and final iteration, I tried to simplify the rules as much as possible while retaining the most important features. Even though it was still a little complex, the partner I played with quickly grasped the rules and got invested in figuring out optimal strategies. The list of actions was solidified and there was only one special rule: you can only play a piece on your last action unless you have the domino. Otherwise the other actions were always available or only based on simple adjacency rules. There were still some high and low moments corresponding to lucky and unlucky dice rolls, but overall the game feels extremely playable and kinda fun.