Race to the End Board Game

Board Game Brainstorming Ideas ^^^

In class we were given the task of creating a quick simple tabletop board game in groups (Cherry Chu, Jenny Park and I) inspired by a recent news headline. Since we couldn't find anything of great interest in the daily news, we decided to take a different approach and looked instead at pop culture and what was trending online at the moment. Inspired by the nose twerking meme recently spreading like wildfire - we decided to completely base our board game around the knowledge of popular memes and internet trends from recent years as a fun game for teenagers.

We wanted to make our game 'different' in how it made players interact with each other. We came up with the idea of linking social media into the board game as well (making sense as most popular memes are generated through the use of social platforms such a facebook or tumblr). We decided that during the game certain squares or cards should have 'dares' on them or 'challenges' that had to be filmed by another player and then posted online. We operated under the assumption that if this game were to ever become realised and promoted, we could use social media as a way to advertise for us - as people playing the game would post videos of themselves attempting the games dares and then hash tagging the name of our game in their comments. Effectively turning our game into a new meme trend on social media.

The end result isn't fabulous^^^^

But we had limited time and it was more about the concept rather than the outward appearance of our game that mattered most. The board itself was made to look like an iphone, one of the most popular devices used by youth in this day and age and the different squares represented the various apps that appear on the phone screen of a typical user.

Using dice and little 'tokens' to represent each player, the goal would be to move horizontally from left to right across and up the board game app squares till you reach the top of the phone. Along the way, if you landed on a blue square, you'd pick up a blue card which would ask you random meme trivia, if answered correctly it let you advance a few more squares. If you landed on the green square, you had to pick up a green card which held a series of social media meme dares, which you would have to perform and then post videos of you doing online via social media - these were seen as 'punishment' cards and did not allow you to advance further on the board once completed.

The goal of the game was race to the end, but with an emphasis on player interaction with each other. Even though they are in competition with one another, we wanted the players to help film each other in embarrassing situations and get them excited over who knows what memes and find some common ground. Our game was inspired by 'Cards Against Humanity' a card game which is often so rude and ridiculous that it becomes a great ice breaker to play among new friends that you'd like to get to know better.

We didn't get a chance to test out the game in class, but our group was confident that a game such as ours produced properly could do pretty well if marketed correctly to the right target audience of young adults who frequent social media often.

The task was a nice introduction into game design, and taught me about considering your target audience and formulating a simple set of rules to guide the player through your game. I learned a lot in a short space of time from the creation of this little board game which I will apply to my final platform game for this assignment.

#boardgame #creation #racetotheend