Game name: Cloverpit
Target Audience: Singleplayer, 13+
Platform: PC/Mobile
Creator: Panik Arcade
Our team’s idea for P1 as it stands is a gambling-based dungeon crawler-like board game where players need to traverse the map and complete several gambling minigames to win the game. To understand how gambling can be implemented as a central theme in games, I played Cloverpit, an incremental game that revolves around spinning a slot machine.
The premise of the game is that you are imprisoned in a small room with a slot machine and an ATM, and you need to deposit an exponentially increasing amount of money to survive deadlines, otherwise the floor below you opens up and you fall to your death. The game features a number of lucky charms that players can purchase to skew the slot machine to their favor, such as increasing the value or multiplier of symbols and patterns, or modifying the chance of certain symbols appearing in spins. Certain lucky charms can have good synergy that lead to powerful combos that help players survive longer into the game.
Going all in on 7’s gave huge wins! On the right is a lucky charm that increases the chance of 7 increasing in a spin
When evaluating this game from “8 kinds of fun”, the two that stand out would be “Sensation” and “Challenge”. These two kinds of fun are created by the core mechanics of incremental games: a target to hit every round that increases exponentially, and a variety of assets that the player needs to take advantage of to skew an otherwise luck-based game in their favor, in the process of which the accelerating increase of scores and stacking of combos create rewarding sense pleasures. A good example here would be Balatro, in which slot machines are replaced with Texas Hold’em. The use of Joker card combos are crucial for beating Balatro, much like lucky charms in Cloverpit. These games are probably best categorised as “Hard fun” in terms of the 4 keys to fun, as players typically need multiple games to grasp the synergy between assets and come up with better strategies. In this sense, the game also contains the fun of “Discovery” as the discovery of new assets and synergies can be rewarding to players as well. The mechanic of meta-progression, in which players unlock new assets after each round of gameplay for future use, adds to the fun of “Discovery” as well.
Visual effect in incremental games is a big component to its sensory reward
Unlocking new lucky charms as meta-progression in Cloverpit
Revisiting our team’s idea, our game, named Highroller, features a map with a central area and four challenges blocked off by a gate. Players can enter yellow tiles to collect tokens, where their reward is determined by a 1d6 dice roll (2d6 in a few special tiles). To open the gates and access the challenges, players need to bet the amount of tokens equal to the value assigned to the gate, then throw a 2d6. If the result is higher than the gate value, then the gate opens for all players and the betting player recovers their money, otherwise they lose their bet and the gate remains closed. Each challenge in the corner is a game of Blackjack that the players need to win, and a player needs to win all 4 challenges then return to the starting tile to win the game.
Current design of the game map designed by Kalu Obasi
Compared to our team’s concept, Cloverpit and other incremental games are uniquely positioned to create sensational fun due to their electronic nature. Tracking multiple combos, accumulative modifiers, and exponentially increasing scores would be intractable in boardgames but trivial in video games, and so are the visual/audio effects that video games can achieve. Meanwhile, as part of the goal of Project 1, our team needs to emphasize on the social aspect or “Fellowship” fun in the game, which obviously isn’t present in Cloverpit as it is a singleplayer game. What lies in common are the “Challenge” and “Discovery” aspects of the games. Cloverpit’s challenge is the payment target that players need to hit every round, whereas our game presents itself as a literal obstacle course. The discovery aspect of cloverpit comes from discovering more lucky charms and their different combos/synergies, while in our game it would manifest as strategizing navigating the map, though it is arguably a weaker aspect.
The lucky charms I got increased the value of 7’s from the base value of 7 tokens to a staggering 1295 tokens. This is most definitely not possible in a boardgame
One mechanic that may lend well from Cloverpit to our game are assets that enable players to skew luck to their favor. As it stands, our game is purely luck-based aside from the movement decisions of the players. Adding these assets, for example, a relic that gives you +1 token on yellow tiles/change your hand by plus-minus 2 when playing blackjack, would create another dimension in player’s decision making. For example, players may need to weigh whether to obtain these assets or tokens instead. They can also encourage player competition by providing them as limited loot on the map, or cooperation by allowing players to trade or exchange these assets. We may test out these ideas in future playtests.
