Analog Game process

The past few weeks we have been asked to re-envision our mentor game into a analog game. Could be a board game, card game, dice game, etc. anything as long as it wasn't digital. Though I love games and really enjoy playing them and teaching them to other people, I have never really had a desire to make a game... so this project was quite exciting to tackle!

For the process to begin, I had to think of what type of game I really enjoy playing and what type of game I could easily build based on my mentor game. I chose a strategy/ territory acquisition style game, similar to the class Risk and a newer award wining game called Small World. 

A few details about my Mentor game and ultimately the inspiration of my game. 

Game title is Zoombinis and it is a puzzle based learning game that pushed learners to try solving puzzles by trial and error and pattern recognition. 

My new game title is Zoombinis: The War Within and goes away from puzzle solving and into the realm of competitive strategy game!

The basis of the game is that years after the original game, the peaceful Zoombinis break into factions and battle to be the dominate faction of Zoombiniville. The first player to conquer all the territory on the board wins the game. 

This game will consist of a board, dice, and player tokens that represent the different factions of the Zoombinis. The core loop of the game is derived of 3 actions. Deploying troops, attacking, and setting defense. Each turn players repeat these actions until they reach the ultimate goal of total dominance. 

Overall, I thought this was a fun project. I have played a lot of games, so getting to sit down and learn what makes a game, a game, was really neat. I started with a basic idea of the rule set and played a few rounds myself, tweaking the rule set as I played along. Having a physical prototype was nice as I worked through this process. 

I unfortunately missed presenting the idea to my peer group, so I didn't have much feedback to go on... but I did work with Dr. Oprean on some ideas about the learning objective/domain. In the end I focused on the idea of Risk Evaluation, as players have to consider the risk/reward of engaging in an attack, especially if the odds are not in their favor. 

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