Week 11 - The Cooler Dice

Our game took a lot of time. It took a LONG time to complete. Between Monday night and Thursday afternoon, we probably spent close to 20 hours on our game. We were tirelessly creating, modifying, adjusting, printing, and — most importantly— balancing our game. 

One of the big issues we had was figuring out what needs to be balanced. Most of our balancing was for challenge vs. success. Our game tended to be too easy and, as Jesse Schell points out, “If the player succeeds too easily, they can become bored.” (Ch. 13). I’m not sure if it was the game itself or the design process, but it was definitely boring at times. A majority of our time was spent playtesting the game for 5-10 minutes, then quickly realizing that some aspect of the game was blatantly unbalanced and scrambling to correct it.

Another balancing issue we had was the issue of dominant strategy (Schell, Ch. 13). One example of this is the battle system. Both the players and the boss must attack each other, but using Battle Battle rules there is no reason to initiate an attack. If both parties have a more or less equal chance of winning a battle, then you are better off using your turn to gain tokens. Eventually, the enemy will attack you and give you the opportunity to win. It happened exactly as Schell wrote, “Once a dominant strategy is discovered, the game is no longer fun, because the puzzle of the game has been solved—there are no more choices to make” (Ch. 13).

To fix this, we made it so that a player's card cannot be killed if it initiates an attack. This way, the player is incentivized to attack on their turn because the risk is greatly reduced.

One area that needs improvement is the trade-offs in our game. On a player’s turn, they can either, draw more tokens, place a card on the field, or attack with an already played card. These choices, however, were not all equal once a game began. For starters, players couldn’t play a card unless it was absolutely necessary. This only happened when a player’s active card was destroyed. Players mostly attacked on their turn and only drew occasionally when they needed tokens for a specific action. This system was not the most “effective” as Zach Hiwiller puts it, “For a trade-off to be effective, each option must provide some benefit and some drawback when compared to the other options available” (Ch. 10). The problem with our options was that they were not all equally appealing, some couldn’t even be used for most of the game. It probably would have been better if we limited the options to two (drawing and attacking) and made both options equally appealing. 

We spent a LONG time working on this, and it’s still not perfect. Even as I’m writing this, I’m thinking of ways to improve the game. But, it was a great experience that will definitely impact the design of my final project.