Post Mortem

Post Mortem

Thirst is a 4 player strategy game. The game has a simple goal, obtain control of all six capitals on the board. This goal has a twist. The twist is that your strategy is based around water. Running out of water makes it harder and harder to survive in this game, much like drought, our social impact. My team and I had a blast creating this game and all of its components. Although some of the components did not work, most of them did and in the end, the game was a success.

There were a couple things that students in class did not like about our game. They did not like the size of the board, it took too long to fight, and they thought the rules were difficult to understand. Our prototype had a maximum number of nine squares per biome, whereas our finished product had fifty. The Corner Crew felt that nine was not nearly enough and made the game too fast to finish, so we came up with a fifty space board. I believe that fifty was a perfect number because it is just big enough to set up you troops and think about your strategy but not too many to make the game seem as if it was going nowhere. For the students, the game was going nowhere. We had several comments that it took too long to fight other players in the game. The game was not designed to be a quick game and I guess that is what our downfall was. Students also agreed that out rules were difficult to understand. The Corner Crew agree with this and we did try to make the rules more simple to understand, but there was really no way around it. We changed the rule wording several times but still no luck. Games we based our game off of, such as Risk, and Settlers of Catan do not have the easiest rulebooks and may take several playthroughs to understand the game, so The Corner Crew believes if those games can succeed, so can Thirst As you can see, we did have a couple things that did not go as well as we thought they would, but we did have a lot of great things going on.

settlers-of-catan board 

Along with the negative feedback, we also obtained a lot of positive feedback. Students really found our board appealing. The Corner Crew was happy for that comment because it took twelve hours to create the board. Students also thought that we had a strong focus. Our social impact was drought, and The Corner Crew stuck to that quite well. Everyone who played our game seemed to enjoy themselves in the end. The game mechanics integrated smoothly into our game. We also completed all fourteen fixes from Jane McGonigal’s, Reality is Broken. In the end, my team and I believed our game was a success.

picasaweb.google.com image of us in mid-creation of the board.

Of course nobody or nothing is perfect. My team and I had a few things that we had in mind for our game that we wanted to do but never got around to. We wanted to paint the board on a cloth sheet instead of a piece of cardboard so it would be easier to fold up. We also wanted individual boxes for our soldiers and capital pieces. We just wanted the game to look as neat as possible. We did not like coming in with a tri-folded poster board, or our soldiers, which were beads, in plastic bags. We would of also like to give each biome an attribute. Next time around, The Corner Crew would integrate these ideas into our boardgame to make the game more orderly and exciting. Luckily, we do have a second chance to apply these ideas. Our game will be viewed at a Student Showcase in the spring semester. There, we will have an outstanding game with all of our ideas added in.