Our game revolves around players competing to amass various art collections. I found that our game shares many similarities with the successful game Risk, where players vie for territorial control. Therefore, for this assignment, I played Risk in order to gain insights that could inform our development process. I hope that understanding what makes Risk appealing to players will help us refine the final version of our game.
I was particularly interested in learning from Risk’s secret mission mechanic, where each player receives a unique mission, such as “Capture Europe, Australia and one other continent” or “Capture 18 territories”. Our game incorporates a similar concept with secret roles, where players might be tasked with collecting specific art types, like Picasso cards or Cubism pieces. Initially, we noticed that without these hidden objectives, players lacked motivation to acquire art pieces. However, even after we integrated secret roles to provide some motivation for players, it still proved challenging to stimulate competitive interaction. Specifically, it was difficult to identify a set of roles that can effectively foster competition among large groups of players simultaneously.
Risk excels in creating dynamic competition by assigning overlapping missions to players. For example, when three players are given missions to “Capture North America and Africa,” “Capture North America and Australia,” and “Capture 24 territories,” they end up directly competing, which significantly heightens the game’s excitement. This observation has been crucial for us as we aim to enhance the competitive element in our own game to keep it engaging and challenging.
Our game also incorporates elements of luck, similar to the dice-rolling in Risk. We’ve added a “counterfeit” feature where players may not know whether an art piece is authentic or a forgery. This introduces an element of chance, though players can make educated guesses based on the behavior of their opponents. For example, if a player notices another hesitating to bid high on an artwork, they must discern whether it’s a bluff or if the piece might indeed be counterfeit. This blend of luck and strategic deception adds a thrilling layer of complexity and entertainment to the game.
In Risk, players can launch multiple attacks during a single turn, adding dynamism and a sense of real-time strategy to the gameplay. We’re considering introducing a similar component into our game, where currently, players are limited to auctioning, buying, or selling just one art piece per turn. This change could potentially make the game more engaging by mirroring real-life scenarios where multiple actions are possible simultaneously, allowing players to decide the extent of their participation in each round.
However, we have concerns that this might lead to players depleting their funds too quickly or create an imbalance in player advantage. In Risk, although players can take many actions per turn, they are still constrained by a fixed number of troops, balancing the freedom of multiple actions with the need to strategize about defense and offense. As we proceed to the next stage of development, we aim to integrate a role-taking strategy that empowers players with more agency, enhancing unpredictability and excitement while maintaining fairness. This will involve careful calibration of game mechanics to ensure no player gains an undue advantage.
