Team 6
Our board game is about the achievements and challenges faces of female scientists! Our game is set up as a path through various stages of life. Players roll a die to move forward through the path. They can pick up life event cards along the way (red, yellow, purple) that represent real achievements and setback of female scientists or challenge cards that test scientific knowledge.
Here is a picture of our first (crappy) prototype:
Playtest Notes
- Cool idea, solid prototype, stages are really cool
- Questions difficulty vary too much
- Maybe challenge cards give different points depending on the difficulty
- Experiment:
- Option 1: have different difficulty of challenges at different stages of life
- Option 2: have 3 different challenge card decks with different difficulty
- Option 3: mix different points in the same deck
- The scientists’ names are easy to forget
- Maybe having the same person play the same role throughout the game
- Place the name at the top instead of bottom
- Add the face of the person
- Replayability issues
- What if we run out of challenge cards?
- What if someone plays it enough and remembers all the trivia answers?
- Tie some of the events to the challenges
- Trivia too separated from the events
- Too luck based
- Balancing who gets to the end first vs who has done more challenges
- More emphasis on people who have been set back multiple times
- Other things to try:
- Introduce player vs player conflict, e.g., swap spots
- Incorporate statistics to determine spots placement and point system
Pictures from our playtest session:
Post-Playtest Action items:
- Modify event cards
- At the top: picture, name, title
- Bottom: You [event].
- Focus on the same 15 scientists and have 3 facts about each of them
- Help people who are behind and frustrated
- Option 1: disperse random global events in the decks
- Option 2: when each person crosses the finish line, everyone has the opportunity to answer a challenge question
- Everyone gets a Mentor Card at the beginning of the game, can use it once only
- Mentor Card:
- Experiment with probabilities (relating to how womanhood changes throughout life)
- Young: 4 sided die
- Mid: 6 sided die
- Old: 2 sided die
Next time:
- Finalize title
- Think about community
- Design a more polished (slightly bigger) game board
