Week 5 – Turning old video games into board games, modifying Liar’s Dice, and some Game Design Discussion

            This week was a bit different from my previous weeks, as we did not have to do 2 board games as usual, which began to turn into a habit (our group had designated Thursday afternoons and evenings as ‘board game Thursdays”). This week, we had to turn any of the listed video games from the Atari era into a board game, as well as redesigning the rules of Liar’s Dice.

            The video game we chose to turn into a board game was Paper Boy, which is a fairly unique game that involves the player playing as a newspaper delivery boy who receives a customer list and a certain number of newspapers. The player must then deliver the newspapers to customers on his/her list, while avoiding certain dangers that could hold you back. For our game, we used most of those components, and added a few of our own. Players do the same thing in our board game, where they receive a customer list and a certain amount of newspapers, and they must deliver it to their customers. Players will roll a die to see how many steps they can take that turn, and must land on a particular address in order to deliver the newspaper to that customer. There is also a newspaper factory, where players can get 5 extra newspapers when they pass through it, similar to passing ‘GO’ in Monopoly. There are also tiles with a question mark, which causes the player who lands on it to draw a card, similar to the ‘chance’ cards in Monopoly. These cards have the ability to affect your progression through the board, as it can hinder you, change your customer list, and even make you lose newspapers. All in all, this game was fairly fun, and proved to be an accurate representation of the video game, with several extra twists to it, which made it more interesting to play.

            For the second part of our assignment, we had to redesign the rules of Liar’s Dice, after discovering the positive feedback loop. Our group had defined the positive feedback loop as the fact that making a bet with the dice has the ability to make bets go higher and higher, which then goes even higher, and can cause players to win and lose big. In order to alter or remove the positive feedback loop, I proposed that players should have the ability to bet on a face value that isn’t just equal or greater to the current face value, but also lower. I had also thought of the idea that there should be an extra “neutral player”, which would just be an extra cup with 5 extra dice, in order to make the game more challenging, as players also have to account for the random neutral dice. During our play tests, these changes proved only to prolong the game, which did not affect the positive feedback loop.

            For my game design discussion this week, I will talk a little bit about the video game Final Fantasy XIII-2, which I have recently purchased and player for hours on end. This game is a direct sequel to Final Fantasy XIII, which was also very fun. The gameplay mechanics for FFXIII-2 are very interesting, as players have the ability to use paradigms, which can be shifted very quickly, and anytime in battle. These paradigms are basically classes for each of your 3 characters, and can include commando (heavy damage dealer), ravager (spellcaster, also increases the chain link on monsters, allowing them to be staggered easily, which allows players to do extra damage to the monster), and sentinel (tank), which are the default classes your characters start with. A unique aspect to the sequel was the fact that players can obtain, use, and upgrade monsters to use as a 3^rd member of the party, since you only get to use 2 human characters in this game.

Here's a short video on how the battle system works:

That’s all for this week, stay tuned for more game design discussion next week!