The Cursed Coins
This is my first game prototype! I have never thought about creating a game or the difficulties behind making a game until now. The theme of this game is pirates and their treasure chests, but there is a twist! They do not want to keep their treasure! They want to get rid of it! For this blog post, I will not only describe the game but also my process of creating this board game.
Here is the description of the game:
“As a pirate, you always want treasure, but not this treasure! This treasure is CURSED! Try to get rid of all of your treasures before it is too late! Make sure all of your coins are in the other pirate’s treasure chest to be safe! Good Luck!”
When I first created this game, I started with a partner. Together, we thought about the game mechanics in Board Geek! Matching and battle, however we were not getting anywhere. So, after an hour of trying to have a start with our board game, we ended up scrapping every idea we had. Then, we started thinking about the theme and items of the game. We had coins and a dice. With that being our starting point, we ended up changing our game mechanics to battle, dice rolling. Our game was mainly a game of luck, but we wanted to change it up a bit by giving our players a choice in the game, which is where the battle mechanics come in. With these foundations, we had a good start of what we wanted for a game. Then, after that, we split our ways, and I ended up refining the game after two more sessions.
The first session was with a cousin of mine. I introduced the game, but there were a couple of hiccups. Since my departure with my partner, I added a couple of changes. starting with one if player #1 coins ends up into another players #2 chest that coin automatically turns into players #2 coin. This caused the game to be a never-ending game with no satisfaction. The second change was that instead of going back one space when landing, the go back space will send the players’ coins back to the treasure chest. Which at one point became annoying. With the feedback provided, I was able to make more changes for my second round.
For my second round, I recreated the board and this time played with my boyfriend. However, again, some tweaks needed to be made by the end of the game session. Instead of having a green spot that says “go back” as in go back to the treasure chest, they go back two spaces as for the yellow spot, there is one spot that says go forward one and another that says go forward 2 times. Though the spots were a lot better, there was a disadvantage for one of the players due to the yellow spots. If you look at the second image to the right, if the player closest to the +2 spot ends up on the +2 spot, then they land on the +1 spot and move up one more. However, the second player did not have that advantage. The second feedback that I got from my boyfriend was that there were way too many coins. Each player had a total of 10 coins. Even though the player’s coins were different, the board game became overwhelming, and the game was a little too long for his liking. With this feedback, I was able to adjust the board game one more time and decrease the number of coins for each player.
Overall, I had three sessions for this board game. One by myself, one with my cousin, and another with my boyfriend. Each game was memorable in its way. There is never a perfect game; however, for my prototype, I would say it would be cool to see a whole audience play this game.
