Week 5!

Our group seems to be working well. Christina, Sunny, Ashley, and I all met up last week to make our playable prototype cards. Since then we played our first prototype in class and we found some problems concerning the strategies that were available to players. Our game seemed to be too luck-based, which in turn created too many trivial decisions for players. After playing with Dr. Parks, we all listened to his suggestions as he applauded us on our play-ability of the game. However, there were several problems including the limitation of luck-based strategy and everything was based on trivial decisions. Dr. Parks suggested we make our destination cards in a certain order in which we receive them. Then we can later stack up points if the destination cards matched our car cards and the destination cards were in a row when we flipped them over. He also suggested we make two piles to our game, one for destinations and one for traffic or special cards. If one were to pick up a destination card, one would also have to pick-up a traffic card. Then the players would be restricted to only picking up or putting down during their turn. After playing one round with the new version of rules, we all collected more points, but the rounds took much longer. Christina thought about making a card that gave a person the ability to peek at another players cards and we all agreed that could work. We still have work to do on our game, but as a group I believe we are also guilty of groupthink. When someone suggests something we tend to agree with them immediately.

 Ashley was very outspoken about how she did not want the game to change into something too complicated. We all originally agreed on her idea for the game which seemed simple and fun. I pointed that out to the group how trivial decisions can be made often and that I was afraid of not meeting Dr. Parks standards. So we all agreed that we needed time to think about the issue separately. Since our last class session, Christina decided to create the final mock-ups of our cards through Microsoft word. We are planning to meet tonight, Tuesday, October 8, 2013 to finalize our issues. Hopefully, we can make a lot of improvements by the time we are finished with our card game.


~Cindy