Board Game Project: For Freedom (2019)
Roles: Project Manager, Lead Game Designer
Tools: Google Docs, Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop
Timeline: 2 months
For Freedom is a role playing cooperative board game created in a team project for the course Foundations of Game Design (IAT 312) at SFU. The goal of the project was to develop a board game with a serious/realistic narrative as the driving force for the game. In the case of For Freedom, the players take the role of African Americans at the start of the American Civil War as they journey north.
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The game is played with 2-4 players who must survive a 5 day journey to a safe location. Each "day" begins with players drawing a positive event card that provides them with small bonuses. The players then enter a crafting phase where they can gather materials or food before ending the day by drawing a negative event card where players must work together to figure out how to solve a problem, such as an encounter with a bear.
Throughout the game, players can also use special abilities unique to the character they have chosen and the difficulty of the game ramps up has players must draw 2 negative event cards on days 3 and 4 while on day 5 they must draw 3. Players who survive all 5 days win the game.
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OVERVIEW
*Note, above assets were created by my team's asset designer, used with permission for a visual example of what the game looked like
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Tested physically using arts and crafts materials
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Knowledge of game balance and economy
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Interpersonal skills in cooperating with a team to find solutions and assign tasks
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Video editing skills for the creation of a quick tutorial video
Final Reflection
SKILLS AND TOOLS:
THE CHALLENGE:
This project was new territory for me as I had never made a board game before, only video and card games. I also struggled with the criteria of the project a bit more than my teammates did as I found it very challenging to develop a game with a serious tone whereas my personal design ethos is to have fun.
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The game actually started as a card game concept that I had previously developed and served as the basis for players getting to choose a character to play as throughout the game. While we weren't able to expand on it, we mixed the idea with another idea I had regarding a narrative driven story to create the basis for the gameplay.
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While my teammates handled the game's aesthetic, my primary role in the project was to develop game pieces and game balance. This includes the character abilities, character base statistics, and the event card statistics. I had to spend a lot of time thinking and rethinking ideas and numbers and fine tuning them to give the game the right amount of challenge.
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One of my biggest challenges was when a teammate of mine tried to assist me with the event card balance without informing me and added a variety of clauses on the cards that made the game too easy. After talking with them, I was allowed to have the final word on the game balance and reverse the changes that were made.
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The project was made over a one month period in which my teammates and I met two times a week for 3-4 hour meetings to discuss and plan.
For Freedom was a huge success with course instructor, course teaching assistant, and high school student testers who found it very fun to play and earned their recognition as the best game of the course offering. My instructor and TA noted that the game felt like a bite-sized Dungeons and Dragons based in a more serious setting and that the cooperative elements really augmented the game experience.
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Initially, I was personally not satisfied with the game due to the serious aspect of the project requirements interfering with my design process. After receiving feedback from my instructor, TA and other people who I explained the game to, I grew to appreciate it and am proud that I was able to not only able work past the design clash, but also excel at it.
Although I wanted to keep the game simpler at the time, if I could go back to change the game, I would add some more complex game mechanics such as weather conditions or perhaps a more climactic final situation for players to overcome on day 5.
Photos of the physical game
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