Project 1. Design and Development of a Board Game

Game conceptions

When coming up with a concept for our game project I decided to look at what board games were considered popular within the community. Boardgamegeek.com is considered the online hub for boardgame hobbyists. I started by looking at the reviews there, the reviews on amazon.co.uk and at the reviews on boardgameratings.com

The idea was to see what gamers liked in their games. What sort of features were found amongst the best selling games and would those features be transferable to a new game.

The results of this research showed me that family boardgames (ie. Monopoly, Cluedo, Risk etc) rarely were in the top ten games of any of the sites I looked at. A couple of variations of monopoly did appear however.
There seemed to be little pattern to the top ten games as well. They were roughly split amongst gameboard-based, tile-based and card-based games. Tile based games did have a small increase over the other game-types but not by anything significant.

One thing the top selling games had in common was that resource gathering/management were at the high end of the review lists across all the sites I had viewed. This wasn't too surprising as I have worked in a boardgame hobbyists shop before and know from personal experience the games that we always sold, or never had enough stock of were the resource management games. (Carcassonne, Agricola, Settlers of Catan,) The majority of these games tended to be tile based as well.

Boardgame Reviews

Scotland Yard

In this game published by Miltion Bradley, one player takes on the role of "Mr X" and has to elude the other players, who have taken the role of "Detectives", across a map of London. Mr X's movement is hidden from the other players, only becoming revealed every three or five turns. The idea of the game is simple. It is a form of Hide and Seek. Where one player must hide his movements and outwit the other players trying to catch him. The game comes down to deception and teamwork.

We had a lot of fun playing this game. The game produces a feeling that there is a battle of wits going on which is highly entertaining. As Mr X I had a lot of fun eluding capture from the other players. However as a detective the game is less fun. It became an exercise in frustration as again and again Mr X escaped our reach. The art style of the game also left something to be desired. None of us enjoyed the drab blues, greens and greys of the board and all of us wanted something more visually interesting.

Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers

This game is one of the most highly rated on Boardgamegeek.com, with an average rating of 7.2. The game itself is an offshoot of Carcassonne. It mainly differs in art style however, the base gameplay is basically unchanged with just a few new additions. The game is tile-based so the gameboard is built up as you play. The objective is to gain points based on gathering resources. I really enjoyed this game, the fact that the gameboard was made up as you go along, meant there was a lot of replayability. Strategies had to change on the fly making for a very dynamic game. The fact that there was no aggressive competition was a nice touch. Having a game where there was no player vs. player mechanic felt like a nice change of pace from most boardgames.

When playing this game, everyone had a lot of fun. I had to teach the other players how to play the game, as I was the only one who had played it before, and the instructions were all in finnish. However the rules are simple enough and after 5 minutes we were away. Everyone had a lot of fun, working out strategies to the tile laying and choosing which resources to go after. Overall this game was the best recieved out of all those we had played.