Our game concept revolves around escaping the island. In a set number of rounds, players search for champion items which fit both the scenario limitations of each round and their personal limitation card. The winner gets to hoard their item, whereas all other players discard their objects into the Discard pile. This judging game requires players to define their own magic circle, as this game can be played in a kitchen, bedroom, classroom, or even outside.
To conduct competitive analysis, I chose to play the game Wing It, which is a judging card game involving extreme storytelling. The target audience of Wing It is anyone aged 12 and above, and the game recommends 4-7 players for each round. Jon Cannon and Molly Zeff are the creators of the game, and this was one Kickstarter as well, so much of the elements within the game are Bay Area-focused. In short, all players draw a hand of five Resource cards and are challenged to use three of those cards to think of a way to solve the problem depicted in the Scenario card. There is a judge for each round, and they decide who has the best solution and therefore receives the Scenario card. The person to reach 3 scenario cards wins and the game ends.
Wing It is extremely similar to the concept of our game, as it is also a judging based game involving mitigating difficult situations through resources. However, our game allows players to turn the environment around them into a key element to the game. For instance, when playing Wing It, I felt limited by the fact that I could only make a story out of the 5 resource cards I had, especially if they were terms I didn’t really understand or know beforehand. On the other hand, our game allows players to scavenge for physical objects in their surrounding, and they are able to unleash their creativity when choosing their resources. Furthermore, our game’s mechanics of involving the environment around the players allows for a heightened level of the senses in dynamics, and can also further propagate the aesthetic of where players are actively fighting over certain resources in the room. This mimics the idea of survival on an actual island, which can make our game a whole lot more realistic. Furthermore, the switch up of Scenario cards for each round in Wing It stops the flow of the stories from happening. This is what I noticed when playing the game. Players would get tired round after round because our imagination would be cut short due to the nature of the game. Another mechanic of Wing It that introduced ethical questions is the presence of a judge. The game designers state that the initial judge can be chosen by the group. The judge is in charge of deciding who created the best solution out of the group, and thus who deserves the Scenario card. However, this can be problematic in a group of strangers playing this social game. Friends can potentially team up and never vote for the stranger in a group, thus leading to discriminatory behavior. This is a negative part of the aesthetic of the game. Contrastingly, our game does not have a judge in each round. Instead, the group takes a vote on who deserves to win each round. This eliminates the potential for biases to occur within each round. This ties back to the video we watched about designing games for friendships. It is important to not place people in a “hard coop” especially as strangers, where my success is dependent on your view of my proposal. This thus makes Wing It a less approachable game for strangers to play.
One clever element of Wing It which is worth learning from is how they manage to spice up the game. For example, there is an additional variation where at the beginning of each round, players give out a Resource card to the player to their left, the this next player must use the card to solve the Scenario. For our game, this could be incorporated by allowing people to steal resources from each other. For example, if players are able to guess what your individual limitation is, such as “pick only blue objects”, they get to steal your entire hoard of items, and you will draw a new individual limitation. This makes the game interesting as time passes.
Overall, Wing It is a good comparison to our game, but I believe that our integration of the space around players makes it all that more exciting!
Sample Scenario card
Playing with a group during Game Night!
