And by ‘Week 5’ I mean all anything I did between the end of term and the submission date.
Example of Play:
First, I made a video of myself playing a four-player game. The birds-eye view was achieved by balancing my phone on a hanging clothes horse – hence the wobble!
Final Tweaks:
Before laying out the rules, I contended with some of David’s feedback on the previous draft – specifically the problem of ‘game decay.’ His suggestion was to remove cards as play progressed, but I suspected that I lacked the time to properly balance that kind of intervention.
My solution was to implement a temporary discard mechanic. I had already come up with the idea of a separate stack of cards, used when the 18-card deck couldn’t be split evenly between players. If any cards were in the discarded stack at the beginning of a round, one would be drawn and placed face up to begin the round’s burger stack. Obviously, this pile was only used for a few rounds.
By adding a discard to that pile every time a player received cards (when they incorrectly repeated the order, or when another player gave them cards on correctly repeating the order), the discard pile would always be full, and with every round at least one card would be rotated out of play. If a player chose to split their correctly claimed cards up between multiple players, the pool of cards in play would decrease, as would the predictability of action.
Unfortunately, I haven’t had time to playtest this addition – something for the future.
Laying Out the Rules:
I used Affinity Publisher to lay out the rules, keeping in mind what I’d learned from the first project of the term. I used icons from game-icons.net to add some visual flair.
I also laid out the print-and-play sheets – quite a simple job, just aligning nine images on an A4. If I develop this game further, I will look to a clearer black and white design, as at the moment it’s a little indistinct.