Thursday, November 7, 2013

Week One

On Thursday, October 31, every student in our Collaborative Writing class presented a unique concept for a new board game. Many diverse ideas were presented. After the presentations, five games were picked to be developed over the course of the next several weeks. Accordingly, students were split into groups to work on each project.

Paul Munnelly's idea for a board game, Zombie Colonies, received a high amount of votes. Joining him to work on this project is Amanda Licciardi, Mark Gainfrancesco, and myself.

At the end of the class last week, the group met for the first time and Paul went into more details of the game. Currently, the game is being designed to be played with four players. The basic concept for the board layout is as follows: 
 
The group is excited to continue working on the game, and it will be interesting to see it progress. The major theme component, zombies, will undoubtedly spice up the dramatic elements of the game.


2 comments:

  1. On Tuesday, November 12, we met at the College Ave Student Center. Here we discussed two major topics on our board game, Zombie Colonies. First, we debated whether to go with a grid layout on the actual board, or to keep with our initial idea of having multiple paths between various locations. Mark suggested it would be much easier to create a grid layout rather than tampering with a system of paths. Though he was right, Evan pointed out it would take away from the gameplay, allowing players to move their settlers around zombie obstructions. Since this was a big part of our movement mechanics, we opted to go with our original idea which makes players change their routes, forcing tactical and strategic thinking.

    Second, we thought about Professor Parks' suggestion, which was to avoid game play which resulted in players keeping to their section of the map. Amanda then suggested to have the locations randomly assigned in the beginning of the game and the first player to reach it is granted a second resource from that spot. The location is then flipped over for other colonies to see. The reward for going to new locations encourages players to explore the entire board. This mechanic plays perfectly into our theme of a zombie apocalypse because the first looters to a store are obviously going to get the best items.

    I then brought up the notion of having daily bonus cards. At the beginning of each turn, someone would flip over a daily bonus card which would be achievable by any player. A description of one of these cards may be "the first soldier to attack another colony is granted an additional resource". This also would give players the incentive to travel across the map, resulting in more player-to-player encounters. These daily bonus cards would stack up, so if Day 1's challenge was not completed, it would carry over and players would pursue different side missions.

    Lastly, we began looking at figurines on ebay and thegamecrafter.com. Bag o' Zombies seems to be the best bet.

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