The Golden Blueberry Awards

an absurdist improv game created by Andreea Jitaru, Angela Wei, Miranda Liu, and Zinnia Cooperrider

Artist’s statement

We designed The Golden Blueberry Awards to evoke laughter and competitiveness among groups of friends, acquaintances, or strangers Each player in our game is an attendee at the Golden Blueberry Awards, where they must compete for their share of the Bloobies! Each round, players will embody a new character and argue that they deserve a Bloobie award. At the end of the round, the host will pick the winner.

Our game has simple mechanics, with cards that can interact with each other in over a hundred thousand ways, making for endless replayability. The rules are straightforward and easy to pick up on, and players become more comfortable while playing, making the game even more enjoyable as time goes on.

Our initial ideation for the game was inspired by our experiences with improv. We believe that improv is a wonderful way for people to tap into their creativity and also serves as a wonderful ice-breaker. Since we wanted to make our game accessible to people without improv or acting experience, we realized that assigning people unique characters or roles allowed even the most reserved, inexperienced players to enjoy improv.

The Golden Blueberry Awards is an ideal social party game, balancing competition with humor and creativity to create an environment of amity, warmth, and excitement.

Concept map

P1 Concept Map

Initial Decisions

Many of our team members had improv experience, and we wanted to bring the elements of what makes improv fun into our own game. We had seen how improv allowed all players to come out of their shells and co-create joy together. Initially, we considered the popular improv game Party Guests, where each player is assigned a role and solves a murder mystery over the course of an evening. The three elements we thought about were (1) unique interactions of roles and events, (2) different rounds introducing new dynamics among players, and (3) room for creativity, personalization, and improvisation.

Unique interactions of roles: Players would randomly draw a role card from the deck and act as this role for the duration of the game. These cards were brainstormed for max oddity or hilarity (i.e. childless soccer mom, person who just came back from study abroad in Amsterdam).
Different rounds introducing new dynamics among players: Role cards were then augmented with goal cards, where players would receive several goals that they had to interact with others in order to complete (i.e. convince someone to join your MLM, propose to another guest and have them accept). After a certain allotment of time for the round, an event would happen that would give players something more to react to, and players would reveal their completed goals to draw new ones.
Creativity, personalization, and improvisation: The wacky cards allowed players to have a lot of fun with the game! We drew on some popular archetypes for the roles, and made sure the goals and events could interact with all or most roles in productive and dynamic ways. There is ample room for creativity and personalization in the improv.

Players: We imagined that our game could be playable with 3-6+ players.
Objective & Outcome: The player who has completed the most goal cards wins.
Procedures & Rules: The game would after 5 rounds, and each round lasts for 3 minutes. At the start of the game, each player draws a role card and a goal card, and after each rounds draws a new goal card.
Resources: Role cards, goal cards, and event cards.
Boundaries: We wanted to implement some general guidelines in improv: “yes, and” and “happy and healthy.” These guidelines allowed players to enact their goals without other players simply dismissing them.

Testing and iteration history

We played a total of four official playtests, with several less structured tests along the way.

First playtest with design team

Our first test consisted of just the design team playing the earliest version of the game. On post-its, we brainstormed several role, event, and goal cards, and played out a few rounds.

What worked: “yes and” rule led to some funny scenarios, the creativity and uniqueness of the roles
What didn’t: unclear win condition, events felt disconnected, goals didn’t interact with each other well, sometimes you wouldn’t want to play a certain role, no theme

First playtest with class

Our next full playtest was in class. This time around, we added a theme to our game: Plus Ones. Each player was now a plus one at a wedding, seated together at an overflow table. We attempted to refine our cards for this playtest, trying to make the goal and event cards feel more cohesive with the roles. We also added a new mechanic that allowed players to change out their cards if they felt they disliked a role or goal card.

What worked: the intro round was entertaining, guessing roles at the end, changing out cards
What didn’t: event cards, too-long round times made the game feel like “small talk simulator”, nonexistent win condition, wanting to redraw role cards, lacking structure, wedding guest theme

Second playtest with class

We revamped our game to take the most pressing feedback into account: the dissonance of the event cards, the lack of an unclear win condition, and too-long round times. We incorporated feedback from players that they most enjoyed the introduction round and the humor of the roles. Therefore, we decided to scrap event and goal cards entirely, instead replacing them with “most likely to” cards. Each player would argue for themselves for 30 seconds, trying to win the Most Likely To title. This gave our game a clear win condition: the first player to five awards would be the winner. To add more randomness to each game, we also decided to separate roles into adjectives and nouns. Each round, players would take an adjective + a noun, and this would be their role.

What worked: enjoyed how easy the game was to pick up, had a good time trying to argue for their character, enjoyed the noun/adj combos
What didn’t: many players just described their characters, some rules were unclear to start, weren’t sure about card orientation, no theme, too similar to Cards Against Humanity or Apples to Apples

Final playtest in class

For this playtest, we made several changes to our game. In class, Krishnan suggested that we could theme our game around yearbook superlatives, which then gave us the idea to make our game award-themed. Referencing the Golden Raspberry Awards (Razzies), we created the theme for our game. This allowed us to further distinguish our game from other fill-in-the-blank type social games and give fun designations for each player (host, attendee), and design a cohesive prototype.

We created three card designs for each of the three card categories (adjective, noun, and Bloobie). We also finalized the content of the cards, preparing 36 of each card (noun, adjective, and Bloobie award). Finally, we greatly refined our rules to emphasize that players should be acting as their character, rather than simply describing them. Most importantly, we created a very clear win condition – the first player to give Bloobies!

What worked: players had lots of fun – great deal of laughter and strong reactions, interaction of the cards, satisfactory win condition
What didn’t: slight confusion with refreshing cards, using double noun cards, not enough noun cards, difficult to get to five awards

Most of the players for our final playtest didn’t know one another, and several of them were more shy or reserved. However, even those players who were more introverted were able to engage with improv, and having mechanics that allowed players to refresh cards gave players flexibility in choosing their roles.

One concern was that players were confused about the mechanic that allowed refreshing cards. In response to concerns about our rules or the amount of cards, we clarified our rules, and also made several more adjective and noun cards to have 45 adjective and 63 noun cards in total! In the new cards we added, we included adjectives and nouns such as “doormat”, “fearful”, and “tired”, to allow quieter players to choose roles that may have felt more natural.

Finally, we changed the win condition to 3 rather than 5 Bloobies. Players felt the awards were evenly distributed from player-to-player, so getting to 5, especially with a larger group, would’ve been too challenging and drawn-out.