Our game, at least at the time of writing, is a party game that revolves around stacking items found at the party location into a big tower (sort of an anti-Jenga). Players receive cards that specify different item characteristics (e.g. “red”, “from the kitchen”, “no flat surfaces”) and actions (e.g. skipping a turn, forcing someone else to take a turn). Players take turns in order to play a card and find and add an item to the stack, or play an action card.
We have a lot of open questions about prototyping this game.
1) Is it better for the entire group to play one big game, or two have smaller groups and pit the winners against each other in a tournament bracket? What is the best number of players?
We need to provide a guideline of how many players is optimal for the game to feel fun. If too many people are playing, and people are only eliminated one at a time by them collapsing the tower, and if the tower has to be reset each time, then it will take too long to obtain a single winner. To test this, we’ll need to make some prototype cards (probably just writing on pieces of paper) and try out the game with different group sizes, and at a location with a sufficient variety of objects (maybe someone’s apartment). I’m guessing the game will be most fun with 2-5 players and that a tournament bracket will be needed for larger groups (if too many people are playing, you have to wait too long to have a turn).
2) What is the win condition?
The most obvious win condition would just be the final person remaining after multiple rounds of people being eliminated upon knocking the tower over (whether a tournament bracket of smaller groups is used or just whittling down a larger single group). But if the tower has to be reset each time and objects have to be put back (it would be less chaotic and potentially less fun to just have a pile of items with easy access nearby from a previous round), this could take too much time and break up the gameplay. So it might turn out that we need a different win condition so that there is a winner every round, or so that there is a quicker way of whittling down the group for successive rounds. One way of doing this might be by defining the winner as the player with the most items contributed to the tower before it collapses, or by assigning different numbers of points to different categories of items, perhaps with more points for harder to stack items. Then the winner is whoever has the most points. Ties could be broken by having a tiebreaker round. I think this point system may be necessary to have winners chosen quickly enough that the game doesn’t stretch on too long. We’ll test this by simply playing according to the different scenarios and using versions of our prototype cards that include point values to see what is the most fun.
3) How long should turns last? Should there be a time constraint?
We don’t want turns and whole games to last too long, or this could make things tedious. We need to figure out if it is more fun to have a time constraint for each turn (e.g 20 seconds) to find and place an item, which could make things more chaotic which could be good for a party atmosphere, or if we should leave turn time unconstrained, which could allow for more skillful placement of items. If turns are too short, players might collapse the tower almost immediately because they don’t have enough time to place the item properly. We also might start out with a long time limit at the beginning and shrink it with each round. I’m guessing that a 30 second time limit will work the best, but I’m pretty unsure. We can easily test this by having someone play timekeeper with a stopwatch.
