Devlog 7 - Conceptualizing, Prototyping , and Playtesting a Card Game

This week we got to work conceptualizing and prototyping a card game based on travel. My group decided to go for an airport theme where the players are each different passengers. The goal of the game is to get rid of all of your cards first or 'board the plane the fastest.' The cards are separated into 4 suits: Food & Drink, Technology, Luggage, and Crowds. The game works similarly to Uno with players playing cards into a pile to match the previously played card's suit or number.  

One thing that we really wanted to include was different types of passengers the player could play as, so we created 4 based on a few different types of passengers you'd see on a plane. A man flying for business, a family traveling together, a person traveling with a dog, and a child flying alone. Each of them gains advantages and disadvantages based on the action cards and which suit they belong to. By doing this we added a degree of decision-making to the game before it fully started. Players have to choose which passenger they'd like to play as. We wanted to add more variables than Uno and that as well as a 'wild card' that you can play whenever to block the effects of other cards were 2 of the ways we did so. The Passenger types each include certain trade-offs (like talked about in Players Making Decisions. Each passenger has a suit that gives them an advantage, disadvantage, double advantage, or double disadvantage. This can affect other decisions they make as well, like whether to change the current suit to one that they have more cards of, but is a disadvantage for them. 

On Thursday, we did an internal playtest with our prototype. ( Macklin and Sharp, Chapter 11) We had to make a lot of the rules up or make changes to the existing rules as we went. We had a general idea but it needed to be fleshed out, which was easier to do as we played and ran into situations that needed those rules. We are still considering several changes, such as adding a mechanic where some of your cards are visible to the other players.  Macklin and Sharp write in Chapter 11 that paper prototypes are best for internal playtest, which is what we did. It was useful because we were able to focus on the utility of the cards instead of the look and we could make new cards on the fly if need be.