What do Prototypes Prototype – Pedro

Question 1: Are Players engaged throughout the entire experience? How long should the game be?

1. Overall since this is a team based game with several 1v1 mini games, we want to keep players engaged both while they are playing, but also when they are cheering on their team members. I predict that there is a sort of ‘goldilocks’ zone of time where both of these activities are very fun and develop fellowship aspects of the game as well as the challenge of each mini game. 
2. This needs to be a low fidelity (challenges written on a piece of paper) comprehensive prototype where the core experience of both playing and cheering is available. We need to be able to see what happens when players are just watching/cheering on their team, and also how this would generate great input into how the point system impacts the engagement of players, and what games are more engaging that others.
3. I predict that engagement will be high, but we will also find that important time constraints keep the pace of the game. One of our references is how engaging flip cup is even when you are not playing. This sense of cheering people on definitely works on fellowship, but also turns up the pressure for those that are informally competing against each other. 

Question 2: Is each mini game as fun as the others.

1. We want to make it so every mini game is accessible to everyone that is participating, but they all have to be fun. Also, we want to balance this with simple strategies for  picking people with particular strengths to represent the team in each mini game.
2. For this prototype, we need to focus on the design of each minigame
   1. Are the rules simple enough to quickly understand?
   2. How is time considered?
   3. Is the game fair?
   4. Is every member comfortable at all times?
3. I think this will be a big pain point for us, as designing mini games will probably show us that several of them just don’t fit the pace/theme/level of fellowship-competitiveness balance that we are looking for. But it will definitely help. 

Question 3: What questions/confusion will emerge during giving the rules/explaining the game?

1. Since we are designing a party/social game we really want to create an experience that is very easy to understand and get right into playing. But we want to balance this with clear instructions that create the boundaries and playability of the game. 
2. For this we need to create a very good procedure/rule handbook that is read before the game starts.
3. I imagine that there will be many clarifying questions when giving these rules out to different people, and we will be able to incorporate the most frequent questions (or even insightfully interesting new rules) into future iterations of our prototypes