Week 11

These past two weeks we have spent creating a card game, a Halloween themed card game. My group  called ours Universal Monsters where you needed to collect a certain monster's items to take over a town and win the game. This game was made up by myself and another group member as the other two were absent. This is not a dis at them, as their absence actually helped us write our rules to make sure they made sense for new players. Like James Ernest says when beginning his article on how to write rules, "...think about your game from the perspective of a new player" (Ernest, 1). With the objective to make sure our other group members understood before the next class period, we had to make sure our rules were easy to read and interpret for new players. When we began to play test our game with our group members and other students the main point given was adding more action cards and changing or adding an action card, but other than that it seemed to make sense. On Thursday, we played the game for the class to see; first by explaining the game, then by playing to give an example. This again seemed like our game ran well and was overall successful as the main questions were how many item cards per monster are there and a reiteration on how to win the game. Looking at Ernest's article and our rules, I do believe we hit all the points he mentioned, including a preamble and clarifications. I was worried that our preamble was not well written as I had only written one to two sentences about the storyline of the game. This worry  was quickly done away with after I read, "This might just be a single sentence in a very simple game..." (Ernest, 2). Phew. In our rules we did need to have a few clarifications that also worked out as examples also as our game had hands trading and the signal for a turn ending or how a player can stop another from winning could get confusing. Ernest states that, "Small examples of play can be used throughout [Sequence of Play]. But...can be presented after the end of main rules" (Ernest, 6). We took the liberty of putting examples and clarifications suring the sequence of play and the how to win sections of our rules so players didn't have to ponder these questions as they were still reading and learning the rules to this game. Overall, I do believe our rules and our game were incredibly successful to the extent that it is a game I hope to introduce to friends later as we have rules that can be used for a simple 52 card deck.