Week 11- Escape! Card Game Reflection

I feel like people received our game pretty positively. I was simple enough to get the hang of while still allowing for some slight strategy. While the final product of our game wasn’t played by other people, they seemed to understand the rules of the game pretty easily. They also really liked how the sleeves looked on our cards.

Players understood the “match to play abilities” mechanic pretty well even though I thought it was the most complex mechanic. During the early playtesting the trapped/skip mechanic seemed to give the most problem. Once we clarified the rules the game seemed to go smoothly. Like James Ernest said in his article clarity is super important when it comes to the rules, and you never know how a player may interpret the rules you come up with. Many of our players were confused when drawing the trap cards. All of the trap cards said “skip, lose your next turn”, which was meant to be interpreted as “you drew this card and now lose your next turn because you are trapped”. Instead players were interpreting it as “play this card to skip the next play” similar to Uno’s skip card. We clarified the rules and stated that if you draw the trap card, place it in front of you to symbolize that you have been trapped and the only card you can discard next turn is the trap card, symbolizing spending the turn to get out of the trap. 

I also agree with Jame’s statement that incorporating a story can help convey the rules and set the tone. This method helped our group create the rules and mechanics of the game in the first place. While coming up with the mechanics we would pitch how the mechanic would work and justified how the mechanic would fit the theme of our game. Thus helping us understand the rules we were creating. Our game was themed after escaping a haunted house. Explaining rules like “kill the monster” and the “drop item” mechanic was easier framed with the theme of the game. The monster would stop any escape attempts you made therefore needed to be killed with a specific item card first before you could win. As for the “drop item” it is simple: you would drop any item you wouldn’t need to escape the house, leaving it for any other player to pick up later, when the discard pile is reshuffled.