Cameron Lefebvre - Crafty Castaways

Team: 4 People Tools: Excel, Miro Role: Systems Designer Timeline: 8 Months

Overview: Tile based Tabletop game where players compete to craft tools and escape the island

Tool Card

Tiles forming the combination

Design Goals

Create a strategic party tabletop game
Have a level of randomness to create replayability so the game feels new each time you play
Game is quick to play so it's easy to pick up and go (20 - 30 mins)

Game Description

Place tiles side by side matching the corresponding biomes to grow your playing field. From the tiles on the board you can craft tools which give you points and unlock special abilities you can use throughout the game. The game ends when a player completes one of four victory tools hidden in the deck. The player with the most points when the victory tool is completed wins.

With thousands of combinations of tiles and a wide variety of tools, gameplay feels unique every time you play leading to a fun and competitive party game for friends and family.

The board from a longer round of gameplay

Takeaways

More isn't always better. We went through many iterations of the game adding new rules and mechanics to make it more complicated and strategic. We tried multiple iterations with lots of playtesting and we found that all these new rules just convoluted the game and made it less enjoyable. When we finally realized this we decided to take a step back and focus on the core pillars of the game. We ended up at a good point where the gameplay sticks to our initial design goals, while still keeping a couple new player focused mechanics that pushed our design into a more enjoyable experience.

Sometimes it's better to prioritize a players perception over a design. I had created a very good formula for a points system for the tool cards that used the shape of the tool to calculate the number of points it's worth. It worked well for all the tiles and made it balanced, but when players saw it their thought was often "why isn't the points just the number of tiles it takes to make it?". It got to the point where this seemed unfair to players and took away from the game, and so even though it was a very good system, we had to rework it due to the players perception.

A cohesive theme that works well with gameplay can transform a simple design into a compelling game that will push players to feel more invested.

Back