Success criteria for my board game:
- Educative
- Fun
- Functions well
- Easy for kids to understand
- Can be played multiple times
- Enjoy with family
- Release stress
A successful educative board game for kids must include these aspects above. Because the purpose of this board game is to educate, educative is clearly one of the most important aspects to be successful. But you kids are not often interested on learning new things, so the board game must also be fun and attractive to them. The rules of this board game must be simple and easy enough for kids to understand them quickly, if the game rule is too complicated, kids will lose their patient on understanding the game. A successful board game must also be played over multiple times, or else it will not be a game that is fun. Fun games can often be played multiple times. At last, releasing stress and enjoy with family is also one of the most important aspect of a board game. Since it is a game, it is supposed to be played and enjoyed with family, and while the family enjoys playing to board game together, it also helps the entire family release their stress.
Design choice:
At the beginning of this project, I have multiple ideas of making a board game, but after multiple rounds of selection, I lowered my design choice down to 2 different types of games: board game, card game.
The reason I picked board game and card game for my project is because they are the most common and popular games for small kids. Because educating small kids is my reason of creating a game, I must create an easy and fun game that can attract their attention. It will also needs to keep them entertained.
After some more researching and digging in to creating games, I chose to create an educative and fun board game for kids. Because I believe that if I successfully created a board game, it will be very useful to teach the small kids. Because an educative, fun and interesting will attract small kids to play. When they are playing this board game, they can enjoy the playing process while the learn about all knowledge of environment protection. When there are multiple people playing the board game at the same time, it can also reduce their stress and make these people’s relationship closer to each other, Also, creating a board game also makes my project very flexible, because there is a wide range of board game, and each of them can have a different set of rules and different set of rules leads to different purpose and different targeted audience. All of these different types of board game can achieve my goal and purposes: educate small kids about the environmental issues happening all over the world. Because of the flexibility of creating board games, I am able to have multiple ideas on creating the board games
Model/sketches/ideas of board game:
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First board game prototype/idea:
This is the first board game sketch. The inspiration of this game board came from the game board of Aeroplane Chess, and Monopoly. I replaced some of the blocks with question marks, these question marks represents a question to the players about the environment. This first prototype of the board game is quite rough and simple. There is no specific rules to this game yet, and it doesn’t really functions well.
Second prototype of board game:
This is my second idea/sketch of the educative board game that I am thinking about. In this sketch, I added a little bit more detail on the game board. I created two layers of tiles to make this board game more playable. I also added some detailed rules and labels to this game. Adding the rules makes my game able to function and more finalised, and by adding the rules, I happen to know more about what kind of board game am I creating and what types problem is the goal for the board game to solve (environment, animal protection)
Third sketch/prototype of board game:
In this sketch, I started to focus more on the size of the game board, and the size of each grid. I tried to make the size of the game board as accurate and symmetric as possible by researching online. I also changed some of the rules in the game. I figured that making the small kids roll a dice to move its figure in the game depends more on luck, and that will not educate them. Instead of making the player roll a dice to move the figure, I decided that I will make six set of cards, and every card have questions on them about protecting the environment. Each set of cards will represent a different number of steps a player can move its figure. If the player correctly answering the questions on the cards, the player will be able to move the number of steps on the card has. But if they answers the questions incorrectly, there will be punishments of on the cards as well. The inspirations of this game came from ()智游戏. This change to the rules make sure that the game can be played multiple times, because there are a lot of questions in the set of question cards, and there will be a low chance of getting the same types questions every round.
Third/final sketch of board game:
In this last sketch of the game, I changed the function of the game board little bit. Even though the change is small, it actually changed the topic I wanted to educate and teach small kids about. Instead of using a Aeroplane Chess game board, I changed my game board to a snake game game board, and switched my educating topic from environments to endangered animals. The two topics sounds very different from each other, but there are actually a lot of similarities between them. Because protecting the endangered animals also the same as protecting the environment. I made this change to the game board because of two main reasons. The first reason is that the goal educating kids about the environmental issues is too broad, by changing the topic to protecting animals made my topic more narrow, and more easy to accomplish. The second reason is that the playability of my original game board is not high enough. In my new game board, I added hunters to increase the playability of the game, and this will attract more small kids to play.
Plans:
With the class time that I have left, my plan is to create a board game that is fun and educative board game that is small and easy to carry around. The final version of board game will be related to all the sketches I drew in class and outside of class. I will use the thin layer of wood for the game board material because it will make the game board very light and that makes it easy to carry around. I want to try and use illustrator and laser cut the shape of game board. I think that will be the best and easiest way to create a game board for my project. I will start laser cutting my first physical prototype of the game board by next class. I will try test it the game out with different and collect feed back from them.
Goals:
The final goal or target for my project is to create physical product of the game, and if I still have enough time, I will also add some decorations on the sides and grids of the board. Creating a game that can be played is my first priority right now, without a physical board game, the kids won’t learn any thing and decorations is bonus points to my board game. It might attract more kids to play, but I have to build a physical version of the board or else the kids don’t have any thing to play with.