Creating my first educational game, American Dream, was a fun and rewarding experience. I really loved getting to research more about the immigration process, thinking about the game and physical design, and using a paper cutter for the first time (super satisfying, 10/10 would recommend).
How Things Changed
One of the most interesting aspects of creating this game was how much our first version differed from our last version. Evelyn and I made the first version of an immigration game the first week of class, and because we were so limited on time, it had super simple mechanics and dynamics (most of the game was basically a die roll with an immigration theme slapped on top of it). Our players had fun, but they felt like they had little to no agency, which was true. We had to be creative to balance the trade-off between choices and luck, since we really wanted to communicate to our players that immigration really does take a lot of luck, though you can actively make choices to improve your odds.
One interesting anecdote to illustrate how our game changed is the game board. In our first version, we had a game board similar to the Game Of Life where your die roll determined how many steps forward you took, which card you drew, and if you’d get a Visa/Green Card. We scrapped the game board entirely because we made so many rule changes and replaced it with a season tracker. However, the paths to victory became way too difficult for players to keep track of and after our lecture about Game Information Design, we decided to reintroduce a new board.
Figure 1. Our first game board: no agency edition
Figure 2: No game board edition, just placemats + a season tracker + a dream + way too much player mental energy
Figure 3: Our final game board, very useful to our players + looks great
Overall, I think we were super successful in responding to feedback and incorporating it into our game! CS377G peers who played our first version and our last version noted how drastically different and more fun it was.
My Favorite Parts of the Game
There were many cool parts to making our game, but I wanted to highlight three. First, I enjoyed introducing the concept of marriage and career into our game, because it presented two very different (but equally valid and real) ways of winning the immigration game. Thinking of specific criteria in the game to mirror real life really challenged us creatively, which was great. Second, I enjoyed designing boards / placemats and thinking of what a player needs to know at any specific moment. If we had more time, I would’ve loved to add even more visual design elements to the game (specifically, I thought either a vintage American theme or a super gaudy in-your-face USA eagle firework theme would’ve been cool). Third, I loved making the game in real life, even though I had to walk 10,000+ steps between my trips to the Lathrop and GSE makeries. We put a lot of effort into making high-quality cards/boards, and I’m proud of how our game turned out.
Another fun fact I just thought of was that we playtested on both U.S. citizens and immigrants. We have many friends actively trying to get green cards/ citizenships, and we overwhelmingly heard “This is too real.”
Figure 4: Beautiful game packaging + design!
