Our Game:
For our game (name TBD), we are making a party game that spurs fun conversation by having players debate fun topics. We want to create a card based judgement game with turn based mechanics like Apples to Apples. For this critical play, I wanted to explore what the debating mechanics might look like, as it is probably the most unique part of the game. For that, I played Million Dollar Doodle.
Million Dollar Doodle:
Million Dollar Doodle is a game where players collaborate to create made up new companies and products, and then pitch them to the group and vote on who had the best pitch. Each round, a player draws two cards that contain two different things that must both be included in a drawing. After creating the drawing, players pass that drawing to their left, and then they look at that drawing and come up with a name for the company, write it down, and pass that to their left. This process continues until there is a drawing, company name, slogan, and some kind of customer review for the company. After that, whatever company players end up with is the one that they have to pitch. Players take turns giving their elevator pitch for their company, and once everyone has gone everyone votes for their favorite pitch, and this continues for as many rounds as the players want.
Key Takeaways:
The biggest things that I took away from play testing were the debate mechanics, voting mechanics, and the scoring system (or lack of). First, I wanted to see what it might look like for players to debate topics, and I chose this game because of the presentation element that seemed similar to a debate. What I found was that the presentation format, while similar, wasn’t quite what we envisioned the game to be. There is no rebuttals or back and forth debates, everyone just takes their turn giving presentations. It was promising in that having players make up arguments on the spot was very goofy and fun, and had the same light hearted vibe that we are going for with our game. This tells us that while we might want to stay away from a formal presentation format and go for more of one on one lively debates. I also learned a lot about the voting mechanics of the game. We were worried about how we were going to do the voting, because we wanted to keep everyone involved in the process round to round, but we didn’t want to create additional debating amongst the voters in deciding who the winner is. In Million Dollar Doodle, you write down your vote individually, and then reveal the results when everyone is done writing theirs. I saw this as a good potential mechanic for our game, because it allows everyone to vote and be engaged while avoiding unnecessary or unwanted arguments. If we go with these voting mechanics we would want to consider potentially raising the minimum number of players to at least 5 so that it isn’t only 2 voters per round, and would need to consider what to do in the event that there is an even number of players and there is a tie in the voting. Finally, the lack of a scoring system also really jumped out at me. For our game, we want it to be competitive, but mostly fun and interactive, which means we were considering focusing less on the win conditions and more about making the game fun to play. I was worried about the motivation and competition level of the players if there wasn’t a win condition, but what I learned from this game was that players will get involved and be motivated to win whether there’s a point system or not, and will have fun regardless. This also means that without a scoring system, players can play as many or as little rounds as they want, as long as they are enjoying the process of the rounds.
