Game Title: Blow Up Monsters
The players outside of class who played this were Jhun’s roommates, George Leung and Brendan Tsai, both of whom are in business. In terms of enjoyment, the other players enjoyed playing it, however there were a few issues. The primary issue was that calculating the health points, attack points and damage points of the players and the monsters would end up becoming very time consuming and occasionally would end up being quite confusing because there would be a lot of values that need to be calculated. In addition, if someone got side-tracked, there is a chance for the players forget how much health they’d have and how much health the monsters would have. Another thing of note was that the smaller Monster Cards were quite hard to hit, but weren’t impossible, this made for an interesting learning curve with people developing unique ways to end up defeating the monsters. Despite getting better at the game though, the results for success still ended up being random. This makes the game difficult to develop a particular strategy for and makes it more luck-based. One of the ways to fix this would have been to maybe add a form of splash damage or use different ways to drop or throw the cards. Although the throwing method was not used due to the fact that it would create a mess and could potentially cause injury. A way to fix the score problems would have been to create a potential application to calculate all the points, including storing the player’s health points and the enemy’s health points after each turn.
Some questions we were trying to answer after our playtest was whether or not to use decimals or whole numbers to do damage, we decided to use whole numbers in order to make the calculations for the score far easier for everyone involved. Another thing that was addressed during and after the playtest was to add a kind of narrative or unique incentive to the game. During both in-class playtests, we didn’t have any kind of story or reason to play the game, nor was there any continuity to the game whatsoever. We had unique mechanics, an interesting concept, but there was no way to give the players much of another reason to play, there were no interesting characters or any story or conceivable end unless all the other players would lose. The concept would also have been fairly interesting if there was more competitive play. For example, other players could sabotage whoever was taking the turn by bowing at their cards before they dropped them, otherwise, the game wouldn’t seem that competitive, and more importantly, there wouldn’t be much fun in watching it because there are very few risks.
