P2: Fishermen’s Wives – Team 04

Artist’s Statement

In a small, unnamed seaside village, the wives of fishermen gather in pairs and small groups after their husbands have fallen asleep. This is the extent of their agency in a society dominated by their husbands’ machismo, pride, and fishing prowess. But their husbands do not yet know how far their wives are willing to go to reclaim power and independence… 

Fishermen’s Wives is a roll-and-move board game in which players, who take on the role of wives of fishermen, must kill their respective husbands for their inheritances. Our game is dark, sardonic, and willing to push the bounds of what equity and women’s liberation look like. Our MVP embodies these values on every level of gameplay, from the game’s reputation- and fish-gathering mechanics that satirically reward meekness and modesty, to player dynamics that encourage affairs with husbands and sapphic alliances between wives, to the game’s fantasy, narrative, and fellowship aesthetics, which ask players to embody their roles as wives, carry out the mini-tales of their husbands’ deaths, and compete with and against each other for victory. Storytelling is a key design value in our game, which is seen in its threads of humor, used to highlight the inequalities in the social fabric of our game; themes of sexual freedom, evident in mechanisms of infidelity, lust, and betrayal; and consistent aesthetic choices, notes of wood and Scandinavian intrigue woven into the cloak-and-dagger underbelly of our seemingly peaceful fishing village.

We built this game hoping for 3-6 players over the age of 16, all savvy and cunning, hungry to win. While we hope that Fishermen’s Wives can act as a temporary outlet for women who feel frustration with patriarchal power structures, we do not mean to limit our audience to women—we believe our game could be a useful tool for all to reflect on their own participation in upholding harmful gender hegemonies. Formally speaking, Fishermen’s Wives is a multilateral competition game, with objectives of capture and race, resources of actions and currency, conflict in dilemmas and other opponents, and conceptual bounds that begin at the edge of the board. Think the multi-locale gameplay of Monopoly and the dice mechanics and “rooms” of Clue, combined with our unique, radically feminist twist. Ultimately, Fishermen’s Wives is a game that not only asks its players to gain wealth and social capital—and therefore agency—but also pushes them to dream of dismantling entire oppressive, hegemonic systems.

Model of Chosen System

Figure 1. System Model. To see in greater detail, visit the original Figma file here.

Our system model demonstrates the basic mechanics of our MVP. Because this is a roll-and-move game, players must advance through the spiral structure of the board to carry out gameplay. They may traverse the board to gain wealth (fish tokens) and reputation (star tokens) in any of the six locations on the board—the Tavern, Love Nest, Docks, Church, Cliffs, and Fish Market. As they travel, they must also strategically spend their wealth and reputation to complete the three “kill conditions” for their husbands, each located in different locations on the board. Throughout gameplay, players develop relationships with one another: some may choose to form sapphic alliances with other players, co-conspiring to kill each other’s husbands and split the share. Others may choose to betray each other, having affairs with each other’s husbands to swindle their inheritances away. In this game where the material stakes are high and the emotional stakes even higher, players discover who they truly are—and what the costs of patriarchal takedown might be.

Initial Decisions about Formal Elements and Values

Fishermen’s Wives has always been a dark, sardonic, and sultry game driven by a strong sense of plot. We began with fleshing these narrative themes out and developing moodboards to build an intuition of what the game would look like: 

Figure 2. A more fleshed-out description of the setting, from our collective Concept Doc.

Figure 3. One of our moodboards.

Because of its strong sense of plot, Fishermen’s Wives began with an array of mechanics that are no longer in play. At the start, players could take on the roles of either husbands or wives, giving the game a Teams vs Teams player dynamic and assigning each team a different motivation: husbands sought to develop a monopoly on the fishing trade in the village, making it financially untenable for the other fishermen to keep living in the village, while wives sought to cause their husbands to mysteriously perish in fishing accidents and frame the other fishermen for the crime. Thus, game pieces included various tiles—three types of fish, sea monsters, and herbs that wives could use to cast spells—and mechanics included pairing each husband to a wife, laying the groundwork for more complicated relationship mechanics to be implemented. From the very beginning, we knew we wanted our board and game pieces to be made of wood, embodying a rustic, weather-worn aesthetic.

By the first playtest, our vision had shifted further: players would roleplay only as wives, not husbands, making the game less factional and more about developing different strategies for a common goal: a multilateral competition player dynamic. This would also allow players to focus on killing their husbands, with kill conditions for each husband being tied to one particular location, making positioning a key part of the strategy. Gameplay would thus be centered around a dice-rolling mechanic that moved players across a diamond-shaped board. Having the starting action of the procedures be a dice roll would allow the game to progress smoothly between locations, allowing players to travel freely back and forth. This procedure led us to consider plans to shift toward more unidirectional layouts, like Monopoly, that would allow players to stop in locations, like Clue. The various kinds of tiles were reduced to just the three fish tiles, representing wealth, though we made plans to include reputation as a currency and to introduce relationship mechanics for both forming alliances with and betraying other players.

Scope

Figure 4. Inclusions of MVP and possibilities for expansion.

We decided to make our game an MVP instead of a vertical slice because it relies on the interaction between all its systems to really work. We needed to see how movement, card play, multiple characters, and social dynamics would all play off each other over time. Since it’s a more social game, a slice wouldn’t capture the pacing or tension that builds throughout a full session. The MVP lets us actually watch how players behave, what choices they make, and where things break down or get interesting. An MVP gives us something we can test and learn from in a way a smaller slice just couldn’t—and as a result, we were able to nail down the primary loop surrounding players as wives, committed to the goal of husband-killing.

Because our submission is an MVP, it allows for expansion in various ways. After developing a base, functioning loop centered around husband-killing, it would be interesting to see how the relationships between players might be further complicated: how, for example, might multi-person alliances (a book club, a secret society, an underground newspaper) work? How would these alliances factor into the storytelling dynamic of the game (the newspaper, for example, might introduce new husband-killing techniques, or news of a particularly big catch, motivating increased speed of gameplay)? Relationships could also be expanded upon between existing characters—the town wench, for example, is a character that factors into Klaus’ death by gonorrhea; allowing characters like her to become more dynamic (e.g. the wench is someone you can find at a particular location, and if you win a bet against her, you can gain a certain amount of reputation and fish) could enrich the narrative of the game. 

At the same time, the economic system could be further diversified. The two types of currency could be diversified by allowing for different types of fish with corresponding values, and wives might be allowed more consistent sources of income. For example, a wife might be allowed to set up shop at the fish market if she pays a certain threshold fee for her stall, ensuring a stream of income beyond case-by-case landings on various locations. 

Finally, another more ambitious expansion might see us return to our initial idea of allowing players to roleplay as husbands, introducing greater complexity to the game’s social dynamic. In this version, which we might call Fishermen and Wives (II), there would be two loops—the preexisting one around husband-killing, and a new loop focused on wife-outwitting—to make for a Tom-and-Jerry dynamic. Players would be able to form factions around their shared interests and goals, fulfilling the similarity and reciprocity principles of friendship formation in game design. In this version, the preexisting relationship dynamics—affairs, sapphic alliances—might be made secret rather than publicly available information, allowing Fishermen’s Wives (I) to build upon its themes of dark intrigue and humor and become the ultimate experience of a fellowship type of fun. 

Testing and Iteration History

Playtest 1: 05/15

Location: Section.

Guiding Questions: What questions do you have about the primary mechanisms? What key features, if any, are missing? (i.e. Where do you get stuck?) What are the most exciting components that you feel should be explored further? 

Summary: Our objective in this playtest was to figure out what the base systems needed to look like (1).We wanted to figure out how players would earn and spend fish, what role inheritance would play, and how individualized husband values could incentivize certain playstyles (2). There was a lot of excitement around making affairs and alliances mechanically meaningful by tying them to both reputation loss and kill condition progress, even though at this point the idea of tracking reputation was still vague (3). While none of the interpersonal or sabotage mechanics had been built yet, there was a lot of energy around adding some form of gambling or trading, especially when players shared a space, which hinted at a game that would thrive on both movement and negotiation. Finally, players expressed some frustration with not knowing what to do when they landed on locations that did not contain their husband (4). 

Changes Made: 

1. We created a number of quantitative mechanisms to flesh out the details of the game. We eliminated the different types of fish in favor of just a singular fish currency—although this game only has a few types of resources (locations, each populated with actions, and currency), we found that just these three kinds were enough to complicate the gameplay sufficiently. As you’ll see in the following playtests, a great deal of questions emerged from just the currency resource, justifying our choice to eliminate sub-resources like different types of fish. We also set how many fish players would receive at the start, and began fleshing out tasks players could perform to earn fish. 
2. We decided on rolling a dice and multiplying the number to determine each husband’s fish worth, which introduced variability and gave players a reason to compare targets, and we began to toy with the idea that affairs could only be established after sleeping with a husband for a certain number of times. 
3. To address the vague mechanisms for tracking currency, we landed on using physical tokens for both fish and reputation to keep everything tactile and visible.
4. We began to play with the different board formats we could use, moving away from the diamond shape toward something with more concrete paths. We began tossing around the idea of spreading out the kill conditions to incentivize players to visit more areas of the board.

 

Playtest 2: 05/20 

Location: In-class.

Guiding Questions: Does the introduction of reputation currency make sense or work? Regarding the core loop, do the kill conditions make sense narratively and logistically? Regarding the less central mechanics, you feel incentivized to engage in relationships with husbands or other players? Why or why not? 

Summary: This playtest revealed that while the game world was compelling, the actual rules weren’t landing for players who weren’t already familiar with them, and that created confusion about what was actually possible at any given time. People didn’t understand how much fish or reputation was required to kill a husband, where those actions could happen, or how to meaningfully build toward that goal (1). At this point in game development, everything felt disconnected and arbitrary, and that confusion led players to ignore sabotage and alliances almost entirely, though they were interested in the idea of adding a factor of stochasticity—for example, allowing sabotage to increase if you rolled doubles (2). Players wondered whether fish and reputation needed consequences if they hit zero, for fear that the game would lack stakes and players could just hoard or stall without penalty (3).

Changes Made:

1. We decided that we needed not only a rulebook, but also more consistent visual or physical prompts that tied the cards to the board in a way that felt meaningful—we began making a style/branding guide to follow, and used that to create Husband Profile Cards with details about kill conditions and their costs.
2. We decided to incentivize affairs by lowering the cost of having an affair to one reputation star, while creating more opportunity for sapphic alliances by allowing players to form alliances when their positions overlapped on any square on the board, not just locations. We based this decision on the idea of proximity in aiding friendship patterns, thinking of sapphic alliances as a chance for players to bond—and with the more chances for overlap, the greater the proximity eventual sense of similarity and reciprocity. We also brainstormed sabotage ideas, but tabled that because we wanted to focus on the core loop.
3. We decided to revisit this question when the loop was more refined.

 

Playtest 3: 05/22 

Location: In-class.

Guiding Questions: Should we revisit the idea of penalizing negative currency? What concrete logistical details need to be accounted for? (i.e. What’s missing from the rules? What edge cases come up?)

Summary: Although we were considering creating a penalty system to discourage letting currency go below zero, we observed that players were not incentivized to hoard or stall now that they had more clarity on the game’s mechanics, per the changes we made following the last playtest. So, we shifted toward refining systems that already existed rather than inventing new ones, making a few new concrete decisions based on player feedback (1). We started asking more detailed questions about our relationship mechanisms, asking: could you trade fish for reputation? How does an affair actually progress? Do you lose rep every time you sleep with a husband, or just once? What about sapphic alliances? (2) This session helped us think in more procedural terms—when breaking down kill conditions into steps that players could track, we agreed that we needed to help players onboard faster and reduce the amount of verbal explanation needed at the table, particularly when it came to the options for play at each location (3). Emma mentioned it was hard to give feedback now that she already knew how everything worked, meaning we needed to design for someone totally new—next time, we decided to playtest with classmates who were unfamiliar with the game.

Changes Made:

1. We already had a starting number of fish, but lacked a starting number of reputation: we set this at one because players found fish to be more compelling of a currency. We also eliminated the idea of threesomes, which sounded fun when proposed by a playtester, but in practice added too much confusion without real payoff.
2. No, fish cannot be traded for reputation, because setting an equivalence would disincentivize players from earning both types of currency when they could easily just focus on earning one. We cemented the idea we’d brought up after the first playtest of solidifying an affair once a player has slept with the same husband three times. Yes, you lose one reputation star every time you sleep with a husband. For the time being, sapphic alliances have no cost. 
3. To compliment the Husband Profile Cards we created after the last playtest, we created Location Cards detailing the avenues of play for each location. 

 

Playtest 4: 05/29

Location: In-class: 

Guiding Questions: As someone who’s completely new to the game, could you give us a broad overview of what makes sense and what doesn’t? How does the board support or inhibit gameplay? What, if anything, would you change about it?

Summary: This was a turning point where we started integrating movement and map logic into the rest of the game’s systems, and a lot of the discussion focused on how players navigate the board—whether movement should be unidirectional, whether players should be allowed to stop mid-path or only at the end of their roll, whether stairs and ladders added value or just confusion (1). We found that people liked the idea of movement being limited in a Clue-like way where you couldn’t just run anywhere at any time, especially if that created tension over reaching a husband or avoiding a rival, but at the same time, some players felt there wasn’t enough incentive to leave their corner unless it was absolutely required (2). This session also raised the issue of tracking progress in more specific terms—for example, who has relationships with whom—so we started talking about adding scorecards or token-based systems to track those more explicitly (3).

Changes Made: 

1. Play around the board should be unidirectional, like Monopoly—players can collect fish when they pass Home. At this point, we had decided to make the game into a more circular form (see Figure 5). Understanding that loops and arcs could be developed around game architecture, we wanted to start with a simple, literal loop and before complicating it with different decisions, actions, and rules for players. The smoothness of our board loop directly informed the decisions made following this playtest: rules such as one allowing players to stop at locations even if they roll past them, because it is otherwise too hard to get anything done, and shortcut actions made possible by stairs and ladders, which are fun and help bridge the distance between locations—all of which diversify player decisions. Loops aside, we did delete a few stairs based on player feedback. 
2. We decided to keep the concept where players can land on a location even if they roll past it (like Clue), but players should only be allowed to stay in their location for one turn before moving on (unlike Clue). 
3. We created double-sided relationship tokens to signify who had active relationships going on.

Figure 5. Image from our fourth playtest.

 

Playtest 5: 06/03

Location: In-class.

Guiding Questions: How do the current game pieces go together? Does the rulebook sufficiently explain the starting conditions? Should the kill conditions be spread out? Are there any imbalances between the currencies?

Summary: In our final in-class playtest, we wanted to test how our final pieces would be received by the playtesters. The final playtest illuminated several areas in the game that needed refinement. The starting condition that menstruation determines who plays first proved useless if the demographic of the players didn’t align on humor or expectations for the game (1). Players seemed to stall in between locations sometimes, suggested changing the placement of ladders and stairs, and noted that the path to the end is too short (2). The rulebook revealed some gaps in explanation: Are stairs bidirectional? Can players stay in the same location? What is the wealth of each husband? (3) It seemed that there was still an imbalance between the husband’s location and the other locations—fairness and incentives to visit different locations needed to be balanced, and some players wanted to know whether they could avoid killing by going in circles (4). Players expressed that the currency and incentive systems need adjustment—currently, players could accumulate reputation without limit, and there was no incentive to kill a husband unless he had a lot of fish (5).

Changes Made: 

1. We eliminated the menstruation condition and decided that a dice roll, with the highest roll going first, would determine the starting player, with play order proceeding clockwise.
2. A few more stairs were eliminated, the number of spaces between each location was reduced by about 50%, and the path to the end was extended to allow players to progress from one location to another without too much extraneous time in between. 
3. Although some of these mechanisms had been decided (stairs are bidirectional while arrows are unidirectional, players cannot stay in the same location, husband wealth is determined with a dice roll now taking place after the killing of each husband so as to increase suspense), these details were made explicit in the rulebook. As we refined our rule deck, we thought about what we’d learned in the Plants vs Zombies onboarding lecture, and found myself splitting instructions up into smaller bits (“sophisticated caveman” style), establishing a logical visual hierarchy (fish for wealth, stars for reputation, octopus for sapphic alliances, shrimp for affairs with someone else’s husband). 
4. A major change we made was changing the kill conditions so that they were spread out across the board, rather than isolated to the single location assigned to a husband. We were mindful to keep the narrative logically intact while incentivizing traversal of the board—we recognized that while these locations, like many architectural items in games, existed primarily to serve as obstacles to husband-killing, they also existed secondarily as “new worlds” with comedic effects to be explored. Thus, we wanted to ensure that the narrative of each husband’s death was still equally as humorous as it was when it was confined to a single location, allowing players a multi-faceted experience of the “architecture” of the game.
5. To balance reputation accrual, we changed the wealth accrual method to require a reputation payment—wealth booster tasks came with a reputation loss. To ensure that everybody was equally incentivized to kill each other’s husbands, we decided to leave the rolling of the dice to determine a husband’s inheritance to after the death of the husband, rather than before (see 2.).

Figure 6. Image from our final playtest.

 

Playtest 6: 06/05

Location: Outside of class.

Guiding Questions: What questions remain? Do the game pieces and narrative convey a clear theme?

Summary: This playtest was performed by our group members and one person who hadn’t played our game before, so we spent time cleaning up and clarifying a lot of lingering ambiguities. Regarding the husband-killing loop, some of the locations and kill conditions had actions that were mismatched, the kill conditions lacked information about the cost of each action, and players had questions about whether kill conditions had to be done in a specific order (1). Regarding the board, we also confirmed that stairs are bidirectional and that players cannot stay in place for two turns in a row to prevent stalling. Regarding the game pieces, we refined the inheritance system to make sure we had enough fish tokens to accommodate all possible rolls (2). The feedback was clear that the theme was working, the board felt visually engaging, and the remaining issues were mostly about clarifying structure and tightening balance rather than rebuilding mechanics from scratch.

Changes Made: 

1. We cleaned up any inconsistencies between Location Cards and Husband Profile Cards, made the cost and location of kill conditions explicit on the Husband Profile Cards so players wouldn’t have to keep referencing the Location Cards, and decided that the kill conditions had to be completed in the order listed to preserve narrative logic (we made this clear on the cards by numbering each condition). 
2. We aimed for 120 tokens across 6 players/husbands using the formula die roll × 3 to determine each husband’s inheritance.

 

Playtest 7: 06/07

Location: Outside of class.

Guiding Questions: Does the game feel cohesive, and if not, what areas should be tightened? What are you most excited by? 

Summary: This playtest was performed by newbies to the game. Feedback was enthusiastic for the premise and aesthetics of the game. Players felt invigorated by the feminist themes, which they seemed to be able to focus on more strongly now that core mechanics were smoothed out. A few remaining questions, with possibility for expansion in the future: Could players be in multiple sapphic alliances at once? What about multiple affairs? Could players kill each other’s husbands? (1) Players were excited by the relationship dynamics of the game, which led us to consider the various ways these could be complicated in a more complete product.

Changes Made: 

We decided that each player can be in a maximum of one sapphic alliance and one affair at any given time, although we wanted to open up the game for the possibility of polyamorous sapphic alliances in the future. We also decided that players cannot kill each other’s husbands, although introducing a revenge dynamic intrigued us.

Final Playtest Video

Ethics

At its core, Fishermen’s Wives questions not just the system of patriarchy, but all the other hegemonies it is entangled in. For example, while we were thinking about making a roll-and-move board game, we were deeply resistant to making the kind of territory expansion games we were used to—games like Monopoly and Catan, which encourage real estate and development and land acquisition as ends within themselves. We wanted to instead conceptualize a world in which property ownership—long a benchmark of the curtailment of rights for women and other marginalized groups—was not the primary signifier of agency. What if women could accumulate wealth by taking advantage of the very system meant to keep them down—to unabashedly show their ankles, so to speak, in exchange for either material benefits, or in exchange for a different kind of, and often more powerful, social capital? Of course, we weren’t envisioning a utopia—Fishermen’s Wives seeks to open up these avenues for liberation alongside a sharp critique of patriarchal values, suggesting that while women are fully capable of making their way in worlds that are hostile to them, the most optimal reality is one in which they do not have to. Allowing players the chance to collaborate with one another, rather than work against each other, is our way of challenging our own game and the world it has copied from reality: what if winning meant not accruing wealth and social capital, as we—the game developers—have decreed, but instead meant simply joining together as a collective, in queer and platonic and all-encompassing love for one another, with a common goal of resisting the late-capitalist insistence on individualism, productivity, efficiency, and so-called advancement? 

Of course, Fishermen’s Wives is nowhere close to perfect. Alongside some of the narrative expansions we’ve outlined previously (see “Scope”), a more refined version of our game would include disability considerations, specifically for vision impaired users. Because Fishermen’s Wives is a turn-based game that lends itself to verbal instructions and has minimal concealed information, it is already slightly more accessible for vision impaired players than, say, Egyptian Rat Slap. Moreover, because it is a board game, it is deeply invested in haptics and touch as sensorial experience, in the hard tap wood meeting wood as a player moves their wife piece from one square to another, the way the head of that wife piece fits perfectly between thumb and index finger, the feeling of being turning a token around in one’s fingers, back and forth, until it’s warm to the touch. It was to craft these experiences that we hand-sanded and polished each game piece, from the reputation stars to the relationship tokens to the wives, and used the laser cutter to engrave the board with different shapes and labels. However, in an ideal world, these engravings would include braille captions, the locations on the board would be texturized, the tokens would be carved with their respective icons rather than stamped, and the wooden wife pieces would be distinguishable by touch, not just sight. The digital component of the game would be expanded to include a read-aloud video of the rule book, accompanied by ethereal, eerie, background music for the most immersive experience, and the Husband Profile and Location Cards would come with braille and read-aloud versions as well. Finally, the color palette would be adjusted to be higher-contrast.

Final Components

To view all the components of Fishermen’s Wives digitally, visit our Figma here. 

Style Guide

Rulebook

Board

Location Cards

Husband Profile Cards

Addendum

Physical Component Iteration

Beyond game mechanics, see how we iterated on making our physical components.

Figures 7 and 8. Sketches for board iterations.

Figures 9, 10, and 11. Iterations on our board, landing ultimately on figure 5 (fewer spaces between locations, fewer stairs, adjusted locations) for our final laser cut. We treated the board as a staging ground for enacting story by asking players to traverse it in order to complete different missions to kill their husbands. We also considered the architecture of the board before designing it in a spiral—we wanted it to function similarly to a Monopoly loop with the “rooms” of Clue, but wanted our version to fall more in line with our ethereal, nautical themes.

Figures 12 and 13. These wife pieces were hand-carved on the wood Foredom, then sanded and stained. 

Figure 14. The reputation stars were created in the same manner that the relationship tokens were: on pieces of sanded and stained wood, marked using hand-carved linocut stamps. 

Figures 15, 16, and 17. A few different paper fish and iterations of CAD files were made before laser cutting the fish, which were also marked with paint.

 

Digital Component Iteration

For our digital component, we created a website that promoted the board game while serving as a landing page for all the information that players may need. We included alt text on the website to better accommodate users with disabilities. 

Figures 18 and 19. We updated the home page to include our physical components rather than a digital prototype. 

Figure 20. We took a significant amount of time debugging. The navigation bar was first semi-functional, so we fixed it to work across all pages. Further features like carousel image display and greater interactivity throughout the website were swapped in and out throughout iterations. 

Figure 21. Our website includes an interactive flipbook for users to understand the rules. 

In future iterations, we plan to implement the carousel gallery for physical components alongside more visual elements to reinforce the game brand.

Website Demo

 

Group 4: Gracielly Abreu, Stella Li, Izzy Meyerson, Ingrid Nordberg