Our game concept is Helicopter Parent, a worker-placement game where highly-involved parents shuffle their kids from activity to activity to get them into the best colleges at the end of the game. Our game hopes to embed values of autonomy and of happiness-as-an-end-in-itself. While the game places you in the shoes of the parent, systems that track the happiness and passions of your children while encouraging you to largely disregard those considerations will convey to players that the game is asking them to do something wrong (similar to how games like John Company are able to criticize the British colonization of India by putting players in the uncomfortable position of the colonizers and then not pulling punches with the human impacts of their actions).
Our game will include two core loops and one core arc. The first loop is the placement and recall of children in each game round, which will be a mod of the worker-placement core of games like Stone Age and Viticulture. There are a limited number of spaces available for each activity, forcing parents to fiercely compete for the best ones. Our second loop will be collecting and spending resources, placing a secondary optimization/sequencing constraint on players.
Finally, the core arc of the game will be upgrading your children. Over the course of the game, your child collects a resume filled with Art, Athletics, Activism, and Academics. These resume items confer benefits in two ways: first, they enhance a child’s abilities, making certain new spaces on the board available for placement and/or increasing the benefit they get from certain locations. This gives opens up new possibilities as the game goes along, keeping play fresh and rewarding. Further, players must pay attention to the specializations of their opponents’ children: it is better to be the best at a less-valuable attribute (like Arts) than the second-best at a highly-valued one (like Academics).
Finally, at the end of the game, the attributes of the children are measured to determine which colleges they each go to (and therefore how many points the Helicopter Parents receive), giving feedback to the players and conferring victory upon one of them.
You can download my mindmap here.
