Devlog 3 - Modding Up the River

This week we had to mod the game Up the River. My group decided to make the game have more dramatic tension and direct competition. We felt that the game could become stale and predictable if one player was able to get ahead early, leaving the other players no chance to win. To change this, we added a rule that once you get one of your 'boats' to the end of the river, you could use a turn to add a lost piece back onto the board. The drawback was you couldn't do anything else that turn, your piece at the dock had to move back a space, and your revived piece was placed on the second to last piece of the board. This also added more strategy and decision-making to the game, as we read about in Chapter 2 of Macklin and Sharp. This made the game more interesting and allowed players who were behind at the beginning to come back. When we played with the new rules, I lost 2 pieces early on and the other 2 players each got a piece to the dock before me. In the original game, I would have had no way to come higher than last, but I was able to bring a piece back and ended up getting 2nd instead. In Macklin and Sharp's Chapter 4, it mentions how failure caused by a perceived flaw in the game can cause people to quit and I think that this new rule helps combat that. Before, I would have had no way to win and I would want to give up because there would be no point in trying to finish the game. Now, my failure made me strategies how to get back into the game and if I could beat the other. Failure no longer felt like a dead end, but an opportunity.

Our other rule change was that if two players land on the sandbar at the same time, they have to duel by each rolling a die. The player with the higher role moved forward one space and the player with the lower role moved backward. This added more tension to the game and upped the competitive play by pitting two players directly against each other. This was entirely based on chance, as is talked about in Chapter 3 of Macklin and Sharp, which was already a part of the base game. We wanted to use that same idea of random chance, but make it more engaging for the players than just rolling the die and moving that amount.