The game that I played for this Critical Play was Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game. The target audience of this game is individuals 13 or older. But, after playing the game I’m not sure if 13-year-olds would actually be able to fully participate in the game because of the complex lingo. Specifically, the target audience of this game is game designers, or at least people who are familiar with game design lingo.
This is a physical card game created by JR Honeycutt and Doug Legandowski and the game is a part of the larger Unpublished Game Network. The network is a non-profit community that supports tabletop game designers and holds events throughout the year. The game is fairly simple and is similar to an Apples to Apples style game. There is one judge who picks either a theme, mechanic, or component of the game. The players then have time to come up with a pitch for a new board game where they can choose the other two elements of the game using the cards in their hand. They then pitch the new game to the judge who hands out a contract for the game that they liked the best. Whoever is chosen to receive the contract is then the judge for the next round. The person who reaches (I believe) 4 contracts first is the winner.
I thought this game was enjoyable but could use some improvements. The overall mechanics of the game were very fun and prompted some absurd games created by the people I was playing with. For example, Noah came up with a game where you use suction cups to enter an alien spaceship. The biggest issue I found with the game was the inaccessibility of the language on the cards. Especially for a game meant for children as young as 13, it was very hard to understand. I found myself not using some of my cards because I didn’t understand either the component or the mechanic on it. Given that we (Stanford students who are taking a game design class) didn’t understand some of the cards, I can imagine how difficult it would be for people with less topic knowledge than us.
The overall mechanics of the game were actually very similar to our game design. Our game is called “Pitch Perfect” and involves pitching a start-up idea to investors. Some people are given cards that say “bluff” and some people are given cards with real companies on them. The companies are trying to get invested in by the VC and the VC is trying to invest in the real companies while avoiding the fake ones. The two games are very similar in the pitching concept while each game has some added complexities. Unpub has the concept of the judge deciding on one element of the game before the round starts as well as players being confined by (or inspired by, depending on how you look at it) the cards in their hand. While with our game, there is no continuous theme each round and each person only has one card at a time. But, with ours the scoring system is a bit more complex with different points being allotted (to both the VC and the players) depending on if the start-ups getting invested in are bluffs or real.
Overall, Unpub was a fun game with an interesting concept. I think that all of the formal elements of the game were great and facilitated a fun game. The only critiques that I have is that the aesthetics, or more specifically the wording of the game, could be worked on to make it more accessible to people. I think that this could easily be a great game for all if the mechanics/ components on the cards were either defined or re-worded. This game was really thought-provoking because it was so similar to our game. One lesson that I learned during this game is to keep the language accessible in our game, which is very important in our game because it is easy to use complex lingo in a pitch game.
