Managenta

During the Festival of Games I also attended the Game Design Workshop for students by Jeremy Bernstein and Karel Millenaar. The focus lay on mechanic-driven rapid paper prototyping. First some really interesting lectures were given about breaking games down into numerical rules. Then we got our 2-day assignment: create a ‘race’ game without any automobiles. On the table next to Jeremy you can see the protoype material: pen, paper, dice, stickies, playing cards and beads!

We quickly settled on the Cold War era, it had quite some interesting races, like the arms race and the space race. The bluffing element really intrigued us; the Soviets were able to scare the Americans shitless one time with a parade of fake wooden rockets. We used that to create our core mechanic. Players needed to bet on elements (for example “space rockets” or “nuclear scientists”) with points. For that they were dealt a number of playing cards, where the reds (diamonds and hearts) represented value while the black cards (clubs and spades) were actually worthless. Placing a pile of cards face-down was the bluffing element. Your adversary’s 5 cards for the rocket could possibly be 5 points (5 reds) or just 1 point (1 red and 4 blacks). By playing your black cards right you could maximize your returns from your red cards.In the picture below, I’ve placed 2 cards over at the green bead. (somewhere in the lower right corner)

It was loads of fun and very informative! Shame I’m not a student anymore next year!