Playable First Draft
We created the playable first draft for Tuesday’s Class. It used the map below, along with actions cards and election cards.
Map
Action Cards (attached a sample of 8 of 16 created)
Election Cards (attached a sample of 3 of 12 created)
Updated Version
We’ve created an updated version based on feedback in the class. Some people thought looping people into political factions defined mainly by their socio-economic standing was offensive. This was of course an over-simplification of reality in order to create a more simple game mechanic, but we’ve decided to change it based on the feedback as a result. Other playtesters didn’t like being assigned a certain group (e.g. low-skill citizen) to play. To address al these concerns, we’ve thus decided to focus more on political parties and how they act to win over population groups that live in different realities, and less on the groups themselves.
For that, please see the updated map below.
The challenge now is to find out how to incorporate the real-life difficulties of getting citizens on board with migration into that new, more party-focused structure. The parties vying for votes across the different provinces/neighborhoods of the map is the basic mechanic, but we’re a bit lost as to how best to incorporate the loops and arcs. We want our game mechanics to represent the real-life dynamics which make different population segments respond positively to different messaging and different policies, but we’re struggling a bit on how to turn that into a game. The different players are going to be running a party each, but we’re thinking how best to make the win parties? Do they need local representatives? Or do we create “national policy cards” from which the players can choose that make them announce a policy promise (e.g. “we’ll lower taxes across the board” which would then make the very poor and the very rich provinces/neighborhoods vote for them, but not the middle-class areas)?
If you have any creative ideas on how to achieve that, know a game that does something similar successfully, or have a process/structured path to think about the loops/arcs beyond the assigned readings, that would be immensely helpful and much appreciated.
