Critical Play: Competitive Analysis

I played the game Pizza Box, which is the concept game from which our P1 game is designed. Pizza Box is a party game ideally played with 6-8 players, with its primary fun being fellowship – the entire purpose of the game is to act as a tool to facilitate spending time with friends. Mechanics are straightforward. You start with a flattened out cardboard box and draw player’s names using a pen and circle them. Players take turns flipping a coin. If the coin lands on a player’s name, that player completes a previously decided upon action, and if it lands on an empty space, that player generates a rule for other players to follow.

Going into the game, my largest focus was to find areas where the game felt like it could be improved and use those insights to help design our game. With this in mind, I felt that the game started slowly. There was a lot of empty space on the box, which resulted in making many rules before being able to play them. This could perhaps be improved by starting with predefined rules or adding some challenges to start.

I was also mindful of how the game handled abuse, and what would happen if a player landed on a challenge that they really didn’t want to do. I thought that our group was very respectful, and we did not experience problems. There were a few instances where people did not want to perform an activity, but we just moved on or allowed a re-toss. Although these actions are not explicitly in the rules, I think that adding an out to our game would be helpful for different groups that might not know each other as well.

About the author

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.