1
For the game of Blackjack:
- Actions: Players can choose to ask for another card or stay with their current cards,.
- Goals: To win against the dealer by achieving as close to 21 as possible, without exceeding it.
- Rules: Players are given two cards to start with. Players can the choose to hit or stand. Royals are worth 10, while an Ace card can be 1 or 11. All other cards are equal to the number on them. If a player busts, the dealer wins by default.
- Objects: A standard deck of cards.
- Playspace: The table in which the cards are dealt, typically within a casino.
- Players: The dealer and then other participants.
2
Now let’s take the ranking of cards in the game Bridge into Blackjack. This would change the rules so that Ace would be worth 14, King 13, Queen 12, and Jack 11. The other cards would retain their value. Typically, players would stand on a card value of 18. Under these changed rules, the dynamics of the game will have also changed. It is likely players stand on a count much lower than 18. Moreover, because the max value of a card is no longer 11, players could bust (exceed 21) even before taking an action, and thus lose by default. By raising the max value of the cards, the game would lose its careful balance.
3
Rock, paper, scissors. In the milliseconds before a hand is thrown, players can choose between rock, paper, and scissors. During this time, I might recall that my opponent had a tendency to play rock after ties, or paper twice before throwing scissors.
4
For a real-time game, I watched my friends play Kites, a collaborative card game where players have to take actions to ensure the kites, represented by sand timers, stay in the air. In the beginning, it’s a slow start to get all the kites flying in the air, to start the flipping of the timers. Once the kites are in the air however, players had to time their decisions based on how much time there was left in the timers. Since the sand timers each had different durations, there were times where my friends would wait out the kites before playing their cards. Other times required a frantic save to flip over the red timer, which had the shortest time. Once all the cards have been drawn, it’s a rush to beat the cloud timer. At this point, my friends no longer watched the timers and were just trying to play all their cards as fast as possible. Once all cards were exhausted, While the rules of Kites were pretty simple, the interaction with the timers makes the game more dynamic.
For a turn-based game, I observed a game of chopsticks. In the beginning, each player starts with one finger extended on each hand. The first player taps the other player’s hand to add fingers on the other player. The second player would then react to the first player’s move. Once players have accumulated higher finger values, they would start going for the kill, that is to eliminate the other player’s hand by giving them a sum of five. By using fingers as the objects as opposed to cards, players can start a game anytime on the go. Furthermore, this allows the playspace to be quickly set up and portable as well.
