P1: Don’t Die in Belladora

Paprika Chen, Judy He, Jessica Yauney

Traveling to a new place is both extremely exciting and potentially terrifying. There are potential dangers ranging from health problems from the food and water to economic dangers like scams and pickpockets. However, some simple planning and preparation can protect from these dangers while setting you up for a great trip. “Don’t Die in Belladora” is a game designed to teach travel safety for novice travelers, age 11+. Players are invited to travel around the fictitious country exploring, meeting people, and encountering surprises both good and bad. They will race each other to complete goal experiences like “Navigate the Giant Market” or “Reach the Remote Viewpoint” while making sure they don’t get sick. As the title suggests players must avoid dying, but that is not the central focus. The surprise when a player pulls a card that tells them they found a clean public bathroom or they lost a turn due to jet lag, leads to laughter and joy in both fellowship and discovery. 

Throughout the game, players’ characters encounter travel related dangers and develop traveling skills. Similar to Splendor, players must accumulate sufficient resources including money💵, know-how🧠 and human👩 help to complete travel goals. These resources are gathered as players move around the board drawing cards from the Unknown, similar to Mario Party. These cards can take or give resources or allow players to take a risk or not. These resources can also be purchased from the resource store. Some strategy exists in which resources you buy and how much you will risk the unknown but chance still plays a large role as players are meant to experience the unexpected, just like real life travel.

Players are introduced to the realities of travel as they read these cards to their peers gaining information. The game presents players with scenarios where this information is useful, inviting them to change their travel preparation habits. Each danger comes with a witty suggestion for how to avoid it when travelling. At the end of the game after accumulating souvenirs (cards) that tracked their trip, players engage in Self-Explaining as they summarize their trip to the other players, reliving the ‘fun’. By slowing players down slightly and inviting them to reflect we avoid the risk of players not taking enough time to read and learn about the tips provided on the cards. Following game play, players will be able to list a variety of travel related dangers and tools to improve travel experiences. Players will be more prepared to adapt to changing conditions based on updated knowledge. 

Players are provided with a full rule book and a small illustrated reminder sheet of rules:

Each game comes with:

1. 1 map-style board showing Belladora
2. 1 travel journal that manages information
3. 1 rule book
4. 4 rule reminder sheets
5. 1 custom d3
6. 12 player trackers (movement, smiles, and health)
7. 24 Belladorian 1 Dollars
8. 15 Belladorian 5 Dollars
9. A deck of resource cards including a 3 card starter deck for each player
10. A deck of unknown cards containing positive experiences and travel dangers.
11. A deck of goal cards

Assessment

Our assessment goals center on retrieval fluency: whether playing the game makes travel dangers/troubles and travel tools more readily accessible in players’ memory. These goals map directly onto our first two learning objectives, which ask players to list a variety of travel-related dangers and tools. Because our playtesters already had travel experience, simply counting how many items they could name would reveal little, since most adults can list a few before playing. To account for this prior-knowledge bias, we held the number of items constant and measured how quickly the group could generate them before and after play. Faster retrieval of the same quantity suggests the game strengthened that knowledge rather than merely adding to it. Our third objective, adapting to changing conditions, is harder to capture through recall, so we addressed it through post-play reflection questions.

Our metrics align with these goals in three ways. First, we timed recall before and after play. In the final playtest, before playing, the group named five troubles in 32 seconds and four tools in 25 seconds. Afterward, they named five troubles in 18 seconds (about 44% faster) and four tools in just 4 seconds (about 84% faster). Second, opening questions about favorite and least favorite trips established players’ prior travel experience as a baseline. Third, questions about favorite moments, competition, and whether players avoided the unknown spots revealed how they responded to shifting conditions. These answers offer qualitative evidence for objective 3 but also just valuable data for game mechanics design. Because the post-play prompts asked for items related to the game, some of the speedup may reflect recency, which is a limitation of our design.

Historical Versions of Game

Given the desired outcome was to share information and the structure of game play also requires significant information we attempted to manage information through two different boards and a variety of cards.

Development of Boards

We initially designed a board that allowed players’ high agency to decide where they wanted to go on the board. This was designed to feel like traveling and map to the real life analog map where they can decide where you want to go next. Sadly, when the mechanic actually played out in dynamics, players were competing to earn smiles so they were strictly optimizing expected value of movement which led them to strictly move in limited areas of the board, losing exploration and not learning as much as they avoided the unknown cards which are directly designed to provide players with information.

This led us to create a single loop track but did not want it to lose the element of traveling around the country so we made the loop wind throughout the board.

While our earlier playtest with experienced board game players did not have trouble navigating the rules, the in class playtests struggled with the rules, spending more time than we wanted so we chose to color code the board to use design elements to make the rules easier to follow. For example, the unknown cards are pink, the unknown spots on the board are pink, and the place on the organizer for the unknown cards is pink. This provides the game information through both words and color.

Finally we incrementally improved by adding even more information to these boards. There were questions about the directions players can move so arrows were added to the board. One line of instructions was added to each of the remaining deck locations reminding players of the rules. We also doubled the dimensions of the boards. The larger boards allow all players seated around them to clearly see the information on the shared boards and provide enough space to accommodate all types of cards. The additional space also allowed players to identify their markers by color and location more easily. We then removed any unnecessary decorative elements, as the sheets already contained many chunks of information and a substantial amount of text. This helped reduce visual distractions and keep players focused on the relevant information.

The last revision included visually differentiating the location of the resource deck from the resource store.

Development of Rules

We initially created a traditional set of typed rules but they took too much time to read so it took away from the time devoted to desired outcomes.

We introduced and then tweaked a single page of visual rules.

Finally we combined the two rules structures into the rules presented earlier in the blog. There is a hierarchical rule book that can be read when players are new to the game or have a question. There is a small rule sheet that helps the player through their own turn. This allows players who want to engage with the rules to do so but all other players the option to jump into game play.

Development of Cards

Goal cards consume approximately 30 dollars, know how or people per smile generated. They are also enjoyable travel activities to reinforce the reason for braving the risks of travel.

Development of Other Pieces

Players each have 3 markers that are matching colors to track their information on the map and in the travel journal. Color is a common differentiating feature in game pieces so we chose to use this in our game. With additional time it would have been fun to design 3D printed travel items as meeples and add a mechanic where each player has a strength based on their meeple.

Playtests

It really was obvious in our playtests that the fidelity of the prototype shifts the feedback received. We received feedback to increase the font on our rules while other playtests did not have defined rules. This is definitely something to keep in mind.

It also was fascinating to see how different, different people approach games and interactions. Our playtesters in playtest 2 identified the randomness as similar to Mario Party, where this randomness is a significant part of the fun. However, playtesters in playtest 4 questioned if there was too much randomness and wanted greater agency. One of my favorite parts of playtest 3 was when one player drew a card that allowed him to gain $3 if he convinced someone to trade resources with him. Another player happened to have an identical resource so it was easy to convince them to trade. Both players laughed. In my head I thought this was a great emergent dynamic when players have identical cards, and lamented that the majority of the time players would have different cards and this would be more complex. Evidently, TAs observing this interaction viewed this as gaming the system and asked how we would prevent it. This game designer would rather add more of these scenarios as they seem to create fun from fellowship in my experience. Players were engaged in a lot of discussion with one another about the content which as a high school teacher feels like an extremely positive indicator of learning but I understand how as a game designer this may be problematic because they are spending time focused on something other than the materials you created.

#	Players	Updates
1	3 game creators All female All 20-35 years old	Add more resource and unknown cards. Up the resource payment from $1 to $2. Read all cards out loud (counter concerns). Describe their trip at the end of the game (add self explanation). Mechanics for goals are updated to add randomness. Add a reward for high health.
2	3 unaffiliated players All male All 20-35 years old	Clarify rules based on questions Updated to looped map You must move the rolled number of times  Add additional positive unknown cards
3	2 CS 377G students 1 male, 1 female All 20-35 years old Significant international travel	Color code board to match card colors Rule clarifications Actions increase memory so adding actioning can increase learning
4	3 CS 377G students 1 CS 377G Lecturer 3 female, 1 male	Explicitly plan for more players ($5 bills) Request for more agency “You can just ignore the bottom text”-> Need to increase learning
5	4 CS 377G students 4 male	Players can move in either direction. (more clarity and more agency)  Provide a rulebook and a mini rule card  Add additional information to the map and travel journal Add a single line encouraging players to focus on learning [thank you to Cabinets of Curiosity for the inspiration]
6	3 CS 377G students 3 female	Players resolved their own rule questions but slight improvements to the rules were made. Players wanted more interactions with peers in the game and while these are present in the decks they were not drawn so some less engaging cards were removed. Players wanted more money so everything was scaled by 10

Final Playtest Video: https://stanford.zoom.us/rec/share/Sb0XMRGs0kr2cY0Klscn4fRvRNrGQTVJpQu_w390WT_jdIMo1JBQS2IXhbzyJVCB.xupraBIPFy4ho2hm 

Passcode: =Kk$?H9l

Overall a large amount of playtest time was spent refining rules given the importance of information in the game. In the penultimate playtest we started to see players experience fellowship fun with playful roleplaying saying “What if I left something at my hotel?” and “I can’t believe they were like, you don’t have a passport to Belladora, then beat you up a little bit.” While this is directly an aesthetic created, it also reflects players interacting with the learning content around hotels and passports.

In the final playtest, players completed the game in the expected time, needed no rules clarifications, and were even able to name the types of fun that they had. They were also more than 2.5 times faster in their response to the post assessment than the pre assessment. The changes that were made following this test were minor enough that an additional playtest was not necessary.

“Print at Home PDF” 

It includes the following contents. Optionally printing the following pages with the following colors may assist in gameplay. If you would rather use a dice you own you do not need to print the paper dice. If you would rather use small markers you own instead of paper markers you will need 3 small markers per person and you do not need to print the markers page.

Item	Pages	Color	Format
Rulebook	1-2	White	One Sided
Rules	3-4	White	One Sided
Board	5-6	White	One Sided
Markers	7	White	One Sided
Resources	8-11	White	Two Sided
Unknown	12-15	Pink	Two Sided
Goals	16-17	Yellow	Two Sided
$10 Dollars	18	Blue	One Sided
$50 Dollars	19	Green	One Sided

Packaging