Game Design Concepts: Level Seven has been posted. It developed two concepts, along with a new readings format (alright, not new to this post, but new to my blog). The readings focused on what makes games fun and types of skills and decisions available in games. This was an interesting topic for me, as the games I've designed for the course so far have all been heavily luck-dependant---the lecture suggested that this was fine for a young children's game or for a gambling game, but what 6-year-old plays games about thieves' guilds? My tower-defence game, as well, has few meaningful choices---you simply place towers on the longest routes.
Today's challenge was a quite difficult one, adding meaningful decisions to the card game War. My original thought was to have each player have their entire half-deck as a hand and play their cards from there. Unfortunately for me, one of the earlier posters on the forums had already put up this idea. Coming up with the next idea was more difficult. I decided on re-arranging the deck you draw from, turning it into a choice what card is drawn next, but not a perfect information choice, as you don't know what the opponent chose. To make this a more compelling choice, I decided to add a time element and limit it to chunks of 10, becuase as Mr. Schreiber said "time pressure makes us stupid". I hope I didn't go too far and also that I went far enough. My rules, sans the context of most of the rules, are available at: Arrange Your Battles.