My Board Game - Evaluation and Feedback

When we were first set this piece of coursework I was unsure which direction I wanted to take it in. I had a few basic ideas on themes that I would like to use but no specific ideas that I wanted to pursue. The main issue was that I couldn’t see how they would transfer into a board game, so I began looking further into board games such as Cluedo, Monopoly, Zombies!!! and Snakes and Ladders. The more I looked at these the more I liked the idea of a money and property management style game, and so I went with one of my original ideas of going with a cops and robbers theme to make this happen, thinking that it would be an interesting and unique addition to the genre. As a whole I feel this was a success, as the style and setting chosen for the game do feel natural and more interesting than other ideas that I had come up with previously.

The main idea of cops and robbers was something I had not really seen being implemented into board games in the past, and the idea of changing it further into US Marshals for their ability to repossess property through asset seizure I felt was an even better idea, and I was able to turn this into a property management mechanic that I thought personally would be more interesting for the player than a simple game of cat and mouse, effectively.

In terms of the actual mechanics of the game, I feel that they added a lot to a simple game mechanic by allowing players to repossess buildings and properties on the Marshals side, as well as robbing and protecting element that allowed characters to gain more money in the process. I feel that this played in well to the themes of the characters and made for a good way of allowing players to accrue money along the way. I also feel that the way players are able to recruit “additional forces” to their game by investing in crew pieces added to the theme and gave the game an additional level of complexity that it wouldn’t have had, and that without it it would have been a lot harder for players to make money along the way, meaning that it would have been harder to purchase property and therefore the game would have fallen apart.

Also I felt that the way players could initiate things such as robbing stores and also performing things such as turf wars, and the ways that dice rolling mini-games would lead to punishments for the lose such as going to prison or the starting square made the game more interesting for the player, and give the players more incentive to do the best they could so as to not worry about losing these things. This mechanic also came through well in the playtest as players did enjoy stealing property away from the competition.

While I feel that all of the mechanics in the game came together in a very solid way, I feel there could have been more added to make it slightly more interesting to the player, and possibly sped up the gameplay. If there were more ways for the player to gain money then game time could have been reduced. Not that playing a long board game is a problem, per say, but adding in another layer would have been better for the player to enhance the level of enjoyment in the game. Additionally, I would have liked to have pieces that were more tailored to the game but unfortunately it was not possible in this instance, and next time pieces such as the money and “crew pieces” would have been more unique and suitable.

While playtesting the game with friends they pointed out that the main issue with the game was that there were too many properties and some of the squares could have been used for interesting things for the player to land on, such as in Monopoly when players land on things such as ‘chance’ or ‘community chest’, where I could have implemented a card based system for quick bonuses. While I could indeed have added some unique squares, I feel that a card system would have been too similar to Monopoly, and not as close to my original plan as I feel the game currently is.

One issue that others seem to have had is that, while they make sense, the rules are written in a way that is perhaps a little long-winded, with friends of mine saying they would have preferred if they were simplified in some way, just so they were easier to read. In future I’ll look into writing rules in a bullet pointed way rather than the way they currently are, to try and accommodate the reader more.

I will also try to find a way to both clarify the rules, and make the terms of winning the game more specific, perhaps by giving players a set amount of buildings to own before they can be called the winner, as someone has pointed out that just playing the game until someone has enough buildings and money that other players can’t progress could lead the game to carry on for too long, leading players to get slightly tired of playing it. Therefore if there was a specific end game in sight they wouldn’t carry on for longer than they wanted to and this in turn would make for a more enjoyable game overall.