Color Rush

In the course game design, we were tasked to come up with a new game idea, implement it and playtest it. When we were tasked with designing a game, we first started by talking about our favorite experiences to get inspiration from non-game-related areas, and doing something with friends or family outside came to mind. We both most enjoy activities that do not exclude anyone, whether it is a younger sibling or your grandmother. For our game we wanted it to be playable anywhere with anyone, without the need for a big game board or pen and paper. So for our brainstorm where we tried to take the previous inspiration, look at lists with lots of different game ideas or just take inspiration from games that already existed by googling board games and bouncing ideas off of each other over the course of a few days to gain different perspectives. Finally, we knew we wanted to design a card game but instead of using numbers, we chose to only use colors, to make it more visually appealing.

Results

To play the game three task cards are laid out in the middle of the table. These cards show which colors are needed to complete them. Now every player draws as many cards as they want from the card deck and on the count of three everyone turns their cards around. The game round begins. Every player plays at the same time and tries to play as many cards as possible, but don’t celebrate just yet, there is a twist: you are only allowed to play whichever card is next in your hand. If there is no space left for you to play your next card, you need to place all your remaining cards on a stack in front of you. The game round has now stopped for you. Once everyone has finished playing their cards, the drawing begins again and the next round starts. The goal of the game is to have the least amount of cards on your stack and the most task cards. If you see a completed task card, you can simply take it, no need for you to be the one to finish it, so think fast! However, if you act too soon and the task card is not completed or you play a wrong card, two extra cards will be added to your stack as punishment. Once a task card has been completed and taken by a player, it will be replaced with a new one in the next round. The game ends once all task cards are finished. For every acquired task card you can remove two cards from your stack. Whoever has the least amount of cards wins the game. If, in the end, there is a tie, the player with the most task cards wins. So far the basic game rules, but there are some special cards to add to the fun factor. A rainbow card can be played as any color, this color doesn’t have to be specified and the rainbow card can be moved within the task card. The sun card can double any color card, but only if the color is already on the task card. With the lightning card, you can steal a card from a task card and place it onto another one, while the cloud card benches a player for the rest of the game round.

The benched player is now not allowed to play any cards anymore or take a task card, they have to place all their remaining cards onto their stack. With the plus cards, you can force a player to draw a minimum amount of cards in the next round. After special cards have fulfilled their purpose, they can be thrown into a garbage pile. This all counts towards the mechanics of the tetrad. As for the technology, we used a painted card deck to enable the easy-going play style of this game. The painted card deck also furthers the aesthetic feel of the game, as well as the use of colors instead of numbers and simplistic symbols to illustrate the different functions of the cards. These symbols have a natural connotation to the actions they hold. You can steal the thunder of players, the sun can reflect colors, and the cloud forces you to stay inside, so you can no longer play with the others. This all helps to make the game suitable and fun for all age groups. Similar to other card games, there is no traditional story since the sequence of the different events is not prescripted but emerges from the gameplay. Games with similar aspects are Ligretto, where you are only allowed to play the first card in your hand, as well as every player playing their cards at the same time, and Eleven Starts!, which also consists of every player placing their cards in the middle of the table and pursuing a common goal. The differences to these games, however, consist of the sole use of colors instead of a combination with numbers and the use of special cards with different functions. With our game, the common goal of completing the task cards turns into individual goals, as anyone can take completed task cards to improve their chances of winning.

Playtesting

The goals of the playtest were to find out which cards are confusing to people unfamiliar with the game, finding a good ratio between special cards and color cards, find out if the game is overall too chaotic and hectic, as well as the opinions on the option to draw as many cards as the players want, which is a significant difference to most card games. Since we wanted to create a game that was enjoyable for all age groups, regardless of their gender identities, we chose to only ask about the age of our testers to be able to get feedback that would help us with further playtests and improvements of the game. As we conducted our playtest almost exclusively with fellow students, we felt that their approval and opinions on the game could help us a lot, since they could assess the difficulty of the game and whether the game is engaging enough not only for children but also older age groups. We excluded gender from our questions because we believe that our game will benefit more from input related to different age groupsand gender would be an unnecessary question that would not help us in further improving the game at this stage.

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To get a first impression of the reactions towards the game and to smooth out bigger issues, we decided to have a playtest before the main playtesting on campus. For this Imet up with some of my friends to try out different versions. During this first playtest, the colors on the task cards were blocks representing the different colors arranged in a patchwork pattern, which was our initial design. During the playtest it became clear that this design of the task cards was slowing down the flow of the game, as the players could not grasp missing colors with one glance, it also made it harder to sort the played cards around the task cards. To combat this issue, new task cards were drawn later where the colors were arranged in a sort of color wheel. This gave the playtesters a better overview of the missing colors and the cards could be sorted very nicely. Another aspect of the task cards they tested was the number of colors on the task cards. With three to five colors on the task cards, the opportunities to play cards were very limited, but when adding more task cards into the game, the table became too cluttered and quite unclear.

To make it more difficult to complete the task cards and to figure out what the ideal amount of colors on a task card is, the amount of colors on them was set to ten to twelve. Now it took longer to finish the task cards, but it became very hard to keep track of the missing colors, and figuring out what was missing slowed down the speed of the game significantly. When settling on eight colors on the task cards, the playtesters found the game to have a nice pace and the cards to be completed in a good time frame. They liked that you could choose how many cards you want to draw each round and had the strategy to draw many cards in the beginning, when there are more opportunities to place them and less and less as the game progresses. With these bigger issues sorted out, we went on to the main playtesting.

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In this playtest session we now focused more on the finer details like the special cards and split cards. We thus also focussed our questions around these aspects. First, we asked about the likelihood of our tester playing the game again, since we wanted to create a game that has a high replayability and does not get repetitive, then we asked about the interaction with the other players to get an impression of how well we reproduced one of the aspects of the experience we wanted to create. We went on to ask about how they decided on how many cards to draw, as well as aspects they disliked and favorite moments. To finish off the questions we asked whether there was anything the players wanted to do but couldn’t to find out if any actions were missing in our game.

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During the first playtest of this session, we included the split color cards and the black and white cards. This playtest helped us a lot in improving the game since the players noted that it was very hard to see the task cards since they were the same size as all the other cards. This size also made it hard to see which colors were missing. To fight this issue we made new bigger task cards on which the color cards could be placed, for the other playtests. Another thing they pointed out was that the cloud card lost a lot of its power if it was played more toward the end of the round. We thought about extending the benching time to another round in this case, but we felt that this could also be too chaotic and confusing, so we decided to leave the cloud card as it was. This playtesting group however figured out that the optimal strategy throughout the game would be to simply draw one card each time. This was not the intended use of the freedom to draw any amount of cards, so we came up with the idea to include another type of special card, the plus cards, with which a player could be forced to draw a minimum amount of cards in the next round.

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With these changes, we went on to the next playtest, which now included bigger task cards and the plus cards. Here we could see a distinct improvement in the placement of the card on the bigger task cards and a better overview of the game. The playtesters also really liked the newly introduced plus cards. They did however not like the split cards at all, especially the black and white card, as they felt they could often not use it strategically. So for the next playtest we decided to get rid of all split cards. For this group, it was enticing to draw more cards to get more of what they called “bullying cards”, with which they meant the plus and cloud cards. When asked about the ratio of the special cards to solid color cards, they felt the ratio felt natural and appropriate. Since they were the first group that tried the game without the split cards, we explained the function and asked their opinion on them. They agreed with what the precious group experienced, that the split cards would be too chaotic.

The last playtest had the same conditions as the previous one and the playtesters were very engaged and excited about the game.

After this playtesting session, we believe that we now have a game that is more engaging, enjoyable, less chaotic, and non repetitive. The changes we made during the session felt very natural and like good improvements. These feelings were confirmed by the two playtests that tested our final version of the game. Overall the playtests helped to improve our game from an idea to a playable and engaging game.