Week three progressed much better. After having stressed about the unviability of the object stacking idea, I spent an hour before our consultation with David iterating on the basics of the project, but inserting more limitations. How could I keep the narrative and visual elements of this burger stack idea, which I liked, but engage more with the mechanics of card games? Why have objects at all when the cards themselves can be stacked?
The game switched, then, from a game of competing teams to a game of competing players – I still hadn’t figured out the rules, as such, but I knew that play would involve players taking turns to place, from their hand, a new topping onto the ‘burger’, and that points might be awarded for its eventual height. I also played with the idea of making a memorisation mechanic, so in order to ‘claim’ or ‘bank’ a finished stack of cards, the player would have to repeat back the order in which the cards were placed (kind of like line cooks repeating orders back to waiters on the pickup!).
My concern about this new direction, however, lay in the number of cards – UNO and the other card-stacking or -shedding games often deal in very large decks, and I only have access to 18. If, say, two are reserved for the top and bottom of the burger, then that’s 16, which results in a very short game between 3 or more people…
Feedback session (07/12/2020):
I pitched this new direction to the group, along with the above caveat about deck size, but David didn’t see this as a problem, especially for a game with a 5-10 minute playtime, and the group enthused on the new direction. David suggested a mechanic like Snap!, wherein each player can ‘claim’ the stack by slamming their hand on the top of it, thus stopping the game from being too rhythmically predictable. This seemed like the last piece of the puzzle, and I left the session feeling positive about iterating a new ruleset, as well as with two games to research (Jazz and Them’s Fighting Words).
New ruleset & playingcards.io ‘room’:
Cleaving to David’s reminder that this game should be quick to play, I quickly bashed out a new ruleset and set up a way to playtest the game digitally. Making a ‘room’ on playingcards.io was way easier than I expected, and I made use of a lot of the platform’s functionality. Below is a visual record of me setting up the room ahead of playtesting.
Playtesting with Arthur and Jacky (10/12/2020):
Notes, questions and reflections:
- Immediately, the ‘goal’ of the game needed more clarity and urgency, so I introduced a shedding mechanic – the goal is to be the first person without any cards in their hand. By claiming and repeating a stack correctly, you can assign the cards to other players, but if you repeat a stack incorrectly, then you pick up all the cards.
- What about ‘incorrect’ stacks? We played around with some restrictions on placing cards: no doubles, doubles allowed, stacks are claimable only if they have at least one burger and one sauce, stacks are claimable only if they have one burger…
- What happens when you can’t go? We tried drawing extra cards (fussy), being forced to claim the stack (too punishing), but the best solution was just passing the go to the next player.
- Control: if stacks need burgers to be claimed, then the player with the most burgers controls the pace of the game. Given that players receive these cards when other players successfully claim a stack, and no cards are currently discarded, it puts advantage in the losing players’ court, and runs the risk of game decay (play proceeding forever).
- It became apparent that claiming the first stack was often a surefire win – the player then only had a few cards to shed in order to claim victory. I will need to look into balancing this, or making stacks more difficult to claim / winning them less punishing for other players. Maybe there’s another pile where cards go? Is shedding the issue here?
- Size of hand – I want to find a way to limit this. Having a hand of 10 cards works online, but holding them in your hand and making quick decisions in person would be aggravating for players in a losing position.
- Size of deck – the 18 card limit means splitting the cards into manageable hands in order to simplify play is difficult. For example, there’s a risk that, if the deck were divided into hands of 4, only one burger would be drawn. Or if burgers and sauces were required to make a stack, that no sauces were drawn.
Lots of questions still to iron out, but at least the response to the game was positive, and I enjoyed playing it.
Post-playtesting ruleset: