CAGD 170

The group I partnered up with for our Unit 3 Playtest made a game called Gold Rush, which was the first one I play-tested with my partner. It was a pretty fun game to playtest, and we were able to get it moving pretty quickly once we started playing.

When reviewing it to give them feedback, one of the first things I did was run some probabilities. In the game you receive amounts of gold by rolling dice, and I was really struggling to get anything. However, upon doing the math, it seemed to be about a 50/50 chance every time you roll, so I was just getting unlucky. However, there were upgrades to assist with this issue, but all of them costed more gold than I was getting. As my partner realized, with his luckier rolls he didn't really have a need for them. So through our testing of the emergent properties of the game, we found that the pretty narrow price range for their shop was too steep a price for struggling players to have access too, but for well off players it was more worth it to just save your money for the win condition of getting 200 gold. However, I praised a lot of the upgrade designs, with some good variety as well as good limits and breakers (for example, increasing your storage space per mining trip to allow players to possibly return with more gold each time to catch up).

• For the players of the game, it's two-player and player-versus-player. 
• The objective is to get 200 gold. 
• The procedures are rolling dice and using a spinner to return gold, as well as buying items from a shop. 
• The rules determine how much gold is given based on each roll and the utilities of the shop items. 
• The resources are gold and shop items. 
• The conflict is that the game is a race between players, as well as being able to buy items that sabotage the other player. 
• The boundaries are fairly abstract, but mainly encompass the two actions you can do as well as the limit on how much gold you can make per turn.
•  The outcome is based on which player wins by completing the race first.

Another game I checked out was called Traveler. I really liked its formal elements of progressing along a board with random encounters, and I really liked a lot of the random encounter cards, with lots of interesting mechanics and variety. The major criticisms I had of it was mostly consistency in its terms and definitions. For example, it used the term curse to refer to a couple different mechanics and didn't really define how it worked as far as I could tell. It also had characters choose one of three classes at the beginning of the game but didn't explain how this changed gameplay. I also assumed players moved along one space at a time, but it's possible there was a different mechanism; however it wasn't immediately obvious on the rule sheet like basic mechanics should be. I still enjoyed reading through everything and think the game has a lot of potential for our next two revisions.

One last game I checked out was called Fury, a player-versus-player fighting game where players can choose to attack or protect specific points of their body. The premise for this game is really cool to me, as well as the main mechanics of allocating different points (distributed by drawing cards) to different limbs or organs to defend yours or attack your opponents. Overall I really liked this one, with my only criticism being some specific organization on the rule sheet.