CAGD 170 Solitaire Postmortem

 I am Milo Bruschke from Group 4. For our Solitaire mod, our group changed the rules in three main ways. First, we changed the objective to be to collect only the royal cards,  listed as the king, queen, and jack of each suit. Second, we changed the behavior of these cards, so that any number card can be played on top of them, but will need to be discarded if it remains on the royal card when it is collected. Third, we reorganized the tableau and stock pile, to make the tableau much bigger and transform the stock pile into a six card hand.

These game mechanics were intended to develop this emergent play: without a great deal of luck, players probably won't be able to uncover enough of the tableau to succeed unless they utilize the royal cards as spaces to play number cards on. So the player can "sacrifice" cards by getting them discarded in order to uncover more space. This forces the player to take risks; moving a number card onto a royal card will uncover extra space on the tableau, but could mean the player misses out on a card they'll need later on.

There's several ways for the player to approach this. A player could just play risky and sacrifice cards, although this might harm them later on. A player could mitigate this risk by sacrificing only low-value cards, such as aces or twos. Alternatively, a player can sacrifice multiple cards at once, getting rid of as much as possible to clear lots of space on the tableau. Or, the safest strategy is to move number cards atop royal ones only temporarily until a different position can be found for it. Because of this complex emergent mechanic of "sacrificing," players can approach the problem in a variety of different ways. They can play risky or safe. 

Through our playtesting, we found that these core mechanics worked really well. We came up with the concept pretty early on and built the rest of the game around it. The iterative design process mostly served to help balance the game. For example, our original version had a ten card hand. However, this meant it was too easy for players to rely on it instead of using the risky royal cards. So for our second version, we reduced the hand down to 6.

During our playtest with another group, they initially found the game very challenging. We intended for the sacrifice mechanic to be something the player learns how to do after some trial and error, so the play-testers found the first time playing fairly difficult. To help fix this problem, we added a visual explaining how sacrificing cards works, as well as some written tips to help guide new players along.

Project completion was pretty easy and efficient for our group. Because we developed a solid core concept early on, most of the work was just writing up the rules and revising them. This was only about a page of writing and we completed it pretty quickly. The other work for our project was creating graphics for the rule sheet. This was also carried out in a timely matter.

Overall, this project was a fun experience that taught us the importance of communication between game designers and players. We developed a unique game through playtesting and refined it both in balancing and in clarity of objectives and mechanics to players. Getting other people to playtest your game can help find flaws in how the game is explained, as you the developer, who is already very familiar with how the game works, might not be able to catch that.