For the context of our game, we are making a Catan inspired game where players move along a board with territories to enact policies and gain votes. Players can negotiate with one another to enact strategic policies to win the majority vote and the presidency.
1. What can we do to encourage players to negotiate or deceive others?
To encourage social interaction and strategy, it’s crucial that we answer this question being the essence of the game. To prototype this question, it would be beneficial to start compiling ideas for policies and territory advantages to see how we can implement strategic combinations. My guess is that this will require some sort of mind-map or network where we can visibly see how the board and cards work together. There needs to be balancing to ensure that no player would be disadvantaged based on their initial starting position/deck.
2. What are exciting and relevant prompts for policies that would make each game fun and strategic?
As the foundation of our game, having policies that create exciting scenarios and have variety is important for the game. In this way, players can have multiple iterations without feeling bored or disadvantaged. This can be prototyped by brainstorming potential attributes, benefits, consequences and power that we can give each policy card. In this way, we can start formatting the way policy cards function and interact with the rest of the game. I think this will open a lot of other ideas on how to integrate other parts of the game and will be successful for balancing.
3. How do we design and encourage movement along our board?
This is another important question we need to ask because movement drives the game forward and we need to pace the game in the way we intend. If the game moves too fast, then this could mean there wasn’t enough time to form a strategy. To prototype this, we can sketch out various ideas for a board and figure out the correction dimensions and shape. This would allow us to visualize the game from a birds eye view so we can design a pace and direction for movement. I’m guessing that this will work well and having multiple designs would allow us to evaluate the complexity, pace and excitement of each game.
