Our team plans to make a card game where players are separated into three groups, regular chefs, spy(s), and a judge. Where the judge randomly draws a recipe and shows it to other players without looking at it and aims to guess it correctly with the help of the chefs, regular chefs take turns drawing ingredients cards based on the previous chefs’ descriptions and describe it in one word in one or multiple rounds to let the judge guess the recipe correctly, and the spy(s) hope to hide the identity while making the judge fails to guess the recipe correctly. The judge and regular chefs can also win if they find out the spy when failing to guess the recipe.
With the prototypes, I hope to answer:
Are our rules and procedures clear and consistent enough to be understood?
- I think this is important players would fail to enjoy the game or start the game if they have trouble understanding the rules and procedures. We are trying to make the game approachable to players with various backgrounds but different cultures or experience backgrounds might lead to different understandings of recipes. It is also important to learn what kinds of differences in backgrounds might add additional fun to the game and what might add too many challenges.
- For example, would there young players not know what are the ingredients to make bread, and what would happen if there were players with limited vocabulary?
- Or, do all players know what the source egg benedicts are made of and agree on whether it should be served with bacon? What if there were vegetarians in the chef team who got confused? Will such differences in understanding bring extra fun or make the game hard to play?
- We could prototype with physical and simple cards, possibly with images of the recipes and ingredients, and play it with people with different cultures/language backgrounds and ages.
- My guess is for common recipes or recipes with images clearly identify the ingredients, the issues for understanding might be minor, while the issues related to different cultural backgrounds and favor for foods might occur when we have complicated recipes or recipes that fall into the unaccepted menu for vegetarians or people with allergies. However, it would still be interesting to learn whether such differences would bring extra fun or not (and I hope there are. e.g. see players arguing that the recipe should be cooked in different ways or introducing to each other how each recipes are cooked at their home.)
Do we want to restrict players by providing limited ingredient cards or specific rules for deciding who are the spies?
- I think it is important as there are tradeoffs between adding limitations to restrict users’ behavior to prevent the game from becoming too challenging v.s. losing dynamics and fun when there are too many limitations. For example, if we only provide a limited set of ingredients, then even players have different understandings of what could make up the recipes, they are restricted by the cards and lose the fun and dynamics to express their different understandings and backgrounds. Similarly, if we restrict the number of spies, then it might make the games more straightforward forward but there might be extra fun if each chef can decide whether to be a spy or not or randomly by rolling a dice.
- We could prototype with different sets of physical ingredient cards (e.g. from a few to more, or no ingredient cards and then players can just use whatever ingredients they want) and prototype with different mechanisms for deciding who would be the spy and see what would be the outcomes.
- I think it would actually be more fun to reduce restrictions for both (e.g. to include the fun as I mentioned in the first question). It would also be super fun to see if all the players decide to be a spy altogether (poor judge!) or if there is only one spy when the players are playing with the rule that they can decide whether to be a spy or not.
How can we decide the hardness to win for the chef + judge team and the spy(s)?
- I think it is important because it would control the balance and fun of the game. For example, when it would be too hard for the spy to win, then the players getting the spy roles might lose their fun and vice versa. There might also be a final discussion time where all the players decide on the spy(s), if it makes it too simple to find out the spy(s), then all the players might lose their fun in deceiving and guessing each other’s roles.
- We want to prototype with different numbers of spy(s) and see how the outcomes would be. I think this is also related to how the recipes and ingredient cards so we can try to find the answer to this question when testing for other two questions together.
- I think the game might be hard for the chef + judge team to win as we set the restriction that each chef can only use one word to describe the ingredient. Even with multiple rounds, it would bring challenges and variations in understanding and guessing what the actual ingredients are.
