#shanesclassrules

Everybody has their favorite board game, whether it be a classic like Chess, Pictionary and Backgammon or a more modern board game like Zombicide, Betrayal at House on the Hill and (my personal favorite) Settlers of Catan.

We began the week with some history into board games, their purpose, and how they compare to video games, but what followed was a surprising amount of fun. We divided up into groups, were each given a board game to play and had a look at it’s gameplay from the other side of the looking glass. Instead of playing to win, we played to try and understand they choices in mechanics, the feel of the game.

Afterwards we were given a very basic, modern board game, designed to be updated, which was our next task. We were given around 30 minutes to design our new game, follower by 15 minutes of testing, 30 more minutes of designing, swapping groups and testing their game (whilst writing notes on problems and/or praises), followed by the last 40 minutes of designing and testing.

So players start on 1 of the spawn points (blacked out tile) move across the map, shoot to kill other players, respawn at any of the spawn points (of the players choosing) and head back into the fight.

Each player has a small deck of cards: 4 move cards (move 1 - 4 tiles respectively), 2 turn cards (turn your player to face in any direction) and 3 shoot cards (fire a bullet in the direction your facing).

Each player place 3 cards from their hand face down in a stack at the start of each round.

Each player then reveals the top card at the same time to indicate the action they will be taking (the stack cannot be altered after placing down all 3 cards, and the top card of the stack is always revealed).

The turn order is as follows: Shoot > Respawn > Move > Turn. All actions of each category happen simultaneously (eg. if 2 players chose shoot cards, they both fire at the same time (if they were facing each other, they would both die then immediately respawn at a spawn point).

Death does not end your turn, after you respawn you continue to use any remaining cards in your stack, following the turn order, with all other players,

Killing a player earns you a point; the game can be played as either first player to X points wins, or player with the highest number of kills in X amount of time wins.