By: Owen Sample, Noah Leibert, Marcus Polson, Willow Azevedo (Team Gopher)
Artist’s Statement
Our intention for Summit Rush was to make a fun, interactive game about climbing a mountain. The twist, the mountain is freezing over, can you climb to the top before everyone else? Or will you succumb to the cold?
The game can be hard to pick up at first, but after you learn it, there are many interesting player interactions to explore. The board tiles (except for base camp) move to a random layout every time you play, causing there to be no single correct path every game, which adds replayability.
Players also have movement points and heat to be able to move. These dictate where and how far you can move. Then there are the cards. The resource cards can help you get in front of others or prevent them from getting in front of you. These cards hold a lot of the strategy in the game. Will you use the coat to get more heat now? Or more max heat for later? Will you set up a camp here? Or is it too risky?
With the strategy our game requires our target audience is 10-60 years old and a love of strategy games. With the changing map and drawing cards there is still some randomness though, which allows less skilled players to still be able to win. This game is fun for a wide range of people, achievers, jokers, socializers, and anyone in between.
Concept Map
Our concept map showing our different core mechanics, including heat, movement costs, item cards, and tiles. All of these work together to form a competitive dynamic between players, all racing to win, but also to prove their strategy as the best one. This results in our aesthetics of fellowship in challenge.
Initial Decisions on Formal Elements
We originally wanted to create a unilaterally cooperative game where the climbers were playing against someone who played the mountain. In this case the zero-sum win condition would have been to either reach the end of the path or prevent the climbers from reaching the end of the path.
In that game the person playing the mountain would in effect be playing an entirely different game than the climbers. However, because we could not give the person playing the mountain enough interesting choices, we decided to remove the mountain role and make the obstacles randomly generated each turn. Which is very similar to Pandemic and Forbidden Island.
We also quickly decided to create a resource deck that players can use to get ahead of their opponents in sneaky ways other than mathematically finding the fastest route. We also decided to add an additional cost to moving: heat. Heat depletes with each tile a person moves to, at first, cards and camps were the only ways to gain heat. But after some iterations, we allowed passive heat to prevent people from just sitting in place hoping for a heat gaining card.
Because we pivoted to a more PVP type game structure, our social element became both accidental cooperation and competition through sabotage. However, competition greatly increased from this decision, especially after the addition of attack cards in the resource deck. In addition, there is a little bit of discovery involved because the board is randomized each playthrough; it will never be the same game twice.
Iteration History
Playtest 1: Classmates
Description: This first playtest was a short session with classmates that hadn’t played the game before. It didn’t get very far, especially because it took a bit to learn the rules. They seemed intrigued by the premise of the game and would have liked to play more had our session not been cut short.
- Takeaways:
- Game is complicated and a bit hard to learn
- Some rules are unclear or not well defined
- Hard to remember everything going on
- Game is fun once you get the hang of it
- Changes:
- Draw frost after each turn(as supposed to each round)
- Wasn’t enough frost/players would forget
- Heat can exceed max, but it gets set to max or below at end of your turn
- Changed map from rectangle to mountain shape(equilateral triangle)
- Each card has a short desc saying what it does as to require the rules less
- Cliffs spawn more often
- Draw frost after each turn(as supposed to each round)
Playtest 2: Internal Playtest
Description: This was a slightly longer playtest within our group, still didn’t end up being a full game though. Helped us identify a lot of issues with the game. We pretty quickly identified that the game was too slow and thus we made changes accordingly.
- Takeaways:
- Not enough interesting choices
- Too many limitations/Game too slow
- Not enough player interaction
- Changes:
- Made game go faster
- Reduced heat costs
- Reduced # of cliffs
- More movement points
- +2 passive heat each turn
- Changed Map Layout again (right triangle now)
- Added item trading
- Made game go faster
Playtest 3: Internal Playtest
Description: Full game playtest, overall went well but there were quite a few things that needed balancing. We realized we overcorrected on letting players move more easily, and we noticed that there weren’t enough mechanics that facilitated players interacting with one another. Some cards were a bit overpowered and others were a bit underpowered, so we adjusted those accordingly.
- Takeaways:
- Game is fun
- Some items are a bit unbalanced
- Need a bit more interaction between the players
- Freeze rules a bit unclear
- Changes
- Balancing
- Less passive heat (1 per turn)
- Flare tie goes up(comebacks easier)
- Food: +1 heat +1 mp this turn & next
- Player interaction
- New item -> trap: -1 mp, -1 heat to next person to move onto the tile
- New item -> freeze: freezes the tile when you move off of it
- Freeze Changes
- Tile you are on gets frozen = -2 heat
- Tile you are on gets removed: -2 heat move to nearest tile down left
- Added summit tokens that fall down if original summit gets frozen
- New Rope Mechanics
- bridge double cliff for 2 mp
- bridge gap in the board for all remaining movement points
- does not cost heat to cross a rope, only heat cost of destination tile
- Cards play at any time during your turn
- instant heat now called handwarmers
- Balancing
Playtest 4: Classmates
Description: Spent most of the time explaining rules, but playtesters enjoyed it once they finally did understand how the game worked. The biggest takeaway was that we need to simplify the rules, and that problem essentially eclipsed any other minor problems that might have come up. There were some clever plays and I think the game mostly worked as intended, aside from unclear rules.
- Takeaways:
- Rules VERY confusing
- Not enough items
- Changes
- Starting your turn on a trap tile = get trapped(if you didnt place it)
- Draw up to 3 in hand(instead of draw 1)
- Added art for cards, tokens and tiles
- Re-wrote rules to be more clear and visually appealing
- Added proper thermometer & heat trackers
- Added reference cards for players
Final Components
Our final product includes the following items:
- 100 Cards: 40 Frost Deck, 60 Resource Deck
- 40 Tiles
- 28 Tokens
- 4 Reference Sheets
- 4 Heat Trackers
- 1 Thermometer Tracker
Here is our Print&Play as a PDF. This is available to anyone. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PQN1AtOH3ygbdfb3BMtdF9TG5cZ2E_sN/view?usp=sharing
This should be printed out double sided, flipped on long edge, with all pages, including blanks, printed out.
Here are some of our assets:
Final Playtest
The final playtest video can be found here: https://youtu.be/AYw7l-V8_W4
Timestamps:
16:30, 22:00, 24:00, 26:00, 30:20, 32:00 all displayed decision making and MDA of the game. Several points showcase the competition amongst players and the strategy as well as luck within the game’s success factors.
