Week 6

            Our group has been making significant progress to our game: Stop N Go. We all met up Tuesday, October 8^th 2013 to finalize our rules and reference guides for play testing the next morning in class.  While play testing, Cindy stayed behind at our original table while Christina and I play tested our peers’ games. Ashley wasn’t feeling well due to her illness and therefore couldn’t make it to class. We received lots of noteworthy remarks on our game, as well as constructive criticism. We were commended on the flow of our game and how smoothly it runs. Our peers also enjoyed using the red and yellow traffic cards because it sabotaged other players. Many of the special cards were said to be really fun to use such as Detour, which had the purpose of having all players pick up cards, and EZPass to counteract, a yellow or red card that gets placed on you. Many of the constructive criticism we received included the game being too simple, not having enough strategy, and the green card not having a purpose.
            At the end of class, Cindy stated she had spoke to Dr. Parks and they went over many possible changes that can be made to our game while taking into account what our peers felt we should change as well. The changes that we all agreed on establishing to progress our game include the following: When one plays the EZpass card he or she can discard 2 cards instead of just 1 because before when the rule was to only discard 1 card, the EZpass and The Green traffic light card basically had the same function. Next when one plays the red traffic light card he or she can choose the person adjacent to him or her just like before but now one needs to pick up both a destination card and traffic card. The purpose of the yellow card is to just skip the next person in the rotation, just as it was before. These changes were made because before the Red traffic light card and yellow traffic light card seemed too similar, however now they have different purposes. Next a big change we concluded on having was that the destination cards don’t need to be in any special or specific order. The objective now is to collect at least 5 destination cards before one can discard all his or her cards because a problem we ran into was that a peer tester could discard all his or her cards, without accumulating any destination cards and win for all other people on the table didn’t receive the chance to discard any cards or obtain destination cards. Another significant change was that instead of only picking up or only discarding cards when its one’s turn, one now has the option to do both or nothing at all. We all believed this added many more strategic elements to our game.  Lastly, when played, the Triple A lasts only for 1 round and the player who places it down is not affected towards a yellow or red traffic card.
            We concluded on making these changes and play tested it a few times in the library and it ran much smoother. I felt everyone was less retrained after we changed the rule of having the decision of both picking up cards and discarding cards during their turn. We also finalized all of our card designs. All that is left to be done is the print and lamination portion. We are planning on meeting up one last time, Tuesday the 15th before our final card game design is due the next day, Wednesday 10/16/2013.