We are Team “Team”! We are interested in building a VHS-themed horror card game, inspired by classic VHS horror style films.
Week 1
We began our process by identifying our interest in creating a board/card game of the horror genre. This was out of a shared curiosity in creating something we don’t usually play, a fascination with the genre’s potential to promote collaborative spirit and fear in equal measures. And because some of our team had experience working with the horror genre in other media.
After identifying our genre, we researched for horror board/card games to play together to develop a good understanding of what is already available, how mechanics/rules work, and what we want to keep/challenge. We played The Night Cage and Arkham Horror together, but were limited by time and could not complete the latter game; we played the former to completion. We all enjoyed the collaborative nature of both games and decided that it was a component we also would like in our game.
In The Night Cage, we were intrigued by the sense of urgency created by limited resource management and darkness encroaching on the players. This element of environmental horror and boad vs player tension is something we want to explore in our game design. While playing Arkham Horror, we spent more than an hour long on setting up the board and understanding the rules. This posed a barrier to game play because the long rule book required more player commitment. We realized that for our game, we wanted the rulebook to be simple enough that the game play is not delayed by players spending a lot of time setting up the game. However, we enjoyed the TTRPG-like style of Arkham Horror and grew inspired by the character cards/sheets – this was an aspect we wanted to adopt in our game.
Combining the aspects we enjoyed from the two horror board games we played, while keeping in mind our main complaint about them – the long set-up time – we realized that cards game were a good balance between the two. Therefore we wanted to create a resource management/survival card game with an environmental horror focus.
We brainstormed and decided we wanted our game to be VHS-themed because of the creepy yet nostalgic vibe. For characters, it made sense that the players were a film crew because it connects to the VHS theme. Keeping this in mind, we decided to play Gloom to get a frame of reference for card games.
Gloom was interesting to us because of how the transparent cards were used to convey information. We enjoyed how the game used the transparency of the cards to elevate both the mechanics and the narrative; by stacking cards on top of eachother, the story attached to the cards advanced and eclipsed with each turn along with the “self-worth” points. There were straightforward actions and visually defined card types that allowed seamless play even for beginners. We also appreciated that the rules were concise and image oriented. The balance between simple rules and a complex game mechanics is difficult to keep, and gloom did a good job of demonstrating complex mechanics in short rule statements. Although the game is primarily horror themed instead of horror oriented mechanics, the layout may be something we would like to adopt.
Week 2
Narrative Building and Characters
When we were discussing VHS-themed horror the first thing that came to mind was the infamous Blair Witch. The hand-held camera and rag-tag film crew aesthetic evoke uncanny horror and nostalgia in equal measure. The medium reminds you of playful memories but the content is anxiety-inducing.
From that, we built our character roles, which we already knew we wanted after playing Nemesis and Arkham. We wanted the characters to be distinct enough to logically have different abilities but similar enough to build up the collaborative theme. With the VHS theme in mind, we decided to make our characters play different roles on a production crew. The Videographer, The Sound Guy, and The Expert (our version of the investigator/host). These characters’ personalities and abilities revolve around collecting evidence. For Example:
The Videographer’s been sneaking into rated-R movies since they were old enough to scam their grandma into giving up her ID. After a couple of dozen screenings of Field Warlock, The Videographer decided they were safer behind the camera.
However, those film crew abilities do become less unique the more characters you have. Therefore, to expand our team and keep it interesting we added the tagalong characters the Photographer and the Baby. The idea for these characters was that while they might not be on the team with the motivation to hunt cryptids they still bring something special to the table.
The Photographer isn’t quite sure what all the forest fuss is about. Before the howling started, the photographer would spend hours in the woods taking photos of woodland creatures for their wildlife journal. Sure, The Photographer doesn’t know what kind of creatures prowl the forest at night. But if those creatures just so happened to be an undiscovered species of monster, even better for their journal.
With these characters, we knew the main narrative tension in the game would be the danger of the cryptids. But the monsters were going to be obscured (hence why you have to hunt them) so it’s hard to make the monsters scarier than their actions (aka the cards). We needed to raise the stakes so that the threat of the cryptids was scary from the get-go.
Then came the idea of the characters being kids, not teens, because teens are gross. What is scarier than being alone in a dark forest as a child, not knowing what rustles in the brush? What is scarier than knowing that you are small in a very big and scary world with no one there to protect you? (*clears throat*)
Hence from those elements: horror VHS, the film crew, and the terror of youth, the Nowhere kids were born. Then the mock-script, the character boards, the character abilities, and then onto mechanics…
Mechanics
When working on mechanics, we wanted our game to be simple to understand but have some complexity that makes it engaging. We focused deeply on ensuring that we maintain its card-game status by limiting the amount of other possible materials given and what they contribute mechanically. We also wanted to make this a game that is slightly more focused on gathering evidence than survival as goals, as we wanted to maximize playtime for all players, and not force a player to sit out and watch. We pulled some inspiration from Nemesis, Arkham, and Gloom as we envisioned our mechanics, but ultimately worked to make our game its own. Our major game mechanics are limited turn-based rounds that involve discarding cards to perform actions, a time tracker that increases the game’s difficulty as players progress towards the end, Cryptid/Monster cards that affect players negatively, and character stats that players must maintain to avoid punishments.
Cards
Our game is built upon four types of cards: Resource, Character Action, Evidence, and Cryptid Cards. These make up a majority of our mechanics and impact the Sanity and Survival of our characters. The Monster cards and Evidence cards can harm the players while the resource cards provide opportunities for the players to buff their stats. We have opted for a red, orange, and green color scheme for a woodland vibe and have made our cards primarily text-based for now since we didn’t have time for visuals.
Building the cards in the monster section, we had to decide the bounds between card text that might be strange, ethereal, or downright terrifying. Looking at various supernatural inspirations from different cultures, we added fun twists to the cards to add to the horror atmosphere of our game. These cards holding attributes based on their lore decided how we implemented their effects on player characters.
For the character action cards, we were inspired by Nemesis’ use of transient and specific cards. Of the 10 character action cards, each player will get 4 cards that are the same across characters and 6 that are specific to their character’s whimsicalities. Not all cards are helpful to game play but they are intentionally written to make game play more fun. A challenge we ran into while making the character action cards is the lack of a board or mechanics that visualize the space around the characters. Since the action cards detail a character’s sometimes spatio visual movements, for the final playthrough, it may be helpful to revisit the idea of a board vs. card game, or how we will incorporate that missing element.
Tokens
We have five types of tokens. Our Star tokens are double sided with one side having an added star bonus and the other being used to visualize corrupted evidence. We also have a time token that will keep track of the rounds. Another type of token we have are the player tokens- these are character-specific meeples that will be used to randomly pick who is damaged by some Monster cards. Other than that the final two token types are Sanity and Survival which each player will use to track their stats during the game. Sanity and Survival are the most variable aspects of the game and we intend to inflict pressure on the players as losing all your Sanity or Survival tokens will negatively impact a player’s abilities.
Rulebook
The rulebook is designed to be thorough yet simple to follow, so that players can pick up the game easily but still be challenged while playing. We give a brief narrative overview of the setting to provide a way for players to connect with the game, define the objective of the game, and then head into materials and set up. Set up is detailed so that players can understand the different pieces of the game while they prepare to play. The last section tells the players how to begin their adventure and what the actual gameplay loop entails.
Week 3
The silent playtest gave us a lot of feedback and highlighted one of the most glaring issues with our game- character action cards. The character action cards (which, admittedly, we had some issues in communication that led to them being disconnected) were not all playable as they were; they were also referencing game mechanics that were never explicitly stated in the rulebook, causing confusion among the players. For the evidence collection, we also realized that it should be limited to once use per round, to make the game more challenging. We also considered clarifying the rulebook and shortening the number of rounds played.
We met up to discuss the silent playtest notes and levied the highest priority tasks among the five of us— 1) to make the character action cards playable; make small edits to other cards (resource, cryptid, evidence) as fit; 2) rulebook clarifications; and 3) game aesthetics (character board, cards, story, box, etc.) using Canva. We updated each other about our progress on individual tasks throughout.
It was time to playtest again! The class’s silent playtest did not get far enough in the game to determine whether or not the difficulty level was balanced throughout. We needed to play our game to completion amongst ourselves to find out. During this playtest, a lot of issues came to light, all surrounding one theme— the game was really hard to lose.
- Players start out with much too high survival and sanity stats relative to what is taken away from them during gameplay.
- Players gather successful evidence too often. By round 2, we had 20+ stars of evidence as a group. After round 10, even though some damage to evidence had been done by the cryptids, the group still had 20+ stars and way more than 6+ evidence cards.
- The rounds felt slow at the beginning when cryptid cards were being drawn at lower frequencies.
- There was little strategizing among the players once we knew we would win. There was more sabotaging ourselves to make the game more exciting.
We shared our individual thoughts on the playtest experience and concluded that we were to change:
- More fail cards
- Make sure it is clear what cards count as “gathered evidence”
- Make evidence harder to gather, maybe once per round limits?
- Opportunity cost needs to higher
- Lower starting stats and max sanity and survival
- Make additions to sanity and survival rarer and smaller
- Introduce cryptid cards in round one and up the amount of cards drawn per round
- Ramping Difficulty
- Buff Cryptid Cards and the penalties they induce
- Nerf the sanity and survival protection cards
- More Character Action Variety
We implemented these edits, making cryptid cards with higher penalties, buffing up the number of evidence fail cards, lowering starting stats, and making evidence gathering less frequent. We also made relevant rulebook edits. At the same time, we coordinated to make Canva designs and develop the materials visually.
With that, we are ready to playtest once more to see how The Wildwoods v2.0 fares!
Week 4
We playtested twice more in class and got to learn of a few more flaws with our game. As we had suspected, our cards were not doing enough to create urgency/horror for the players because the players had too many resources, sanity/survival tokens, and/or evidence.
We were lucky to have the first playtest with only 3 players (min. players required to play) and the second playtest with 5 players (max. capacity of our game) – this showed us that the difficulty of the game differed by group sizes. The resource pool was shorter for 5 players which helped induce more tension but three players had less actions to recoup their resources as a team each turn. Nonetheless, both playtests showed us that we had to UP the tension between resources, evidence, sanity, and survival gained and lost throughout the game.
We decided to balance these factors through minor edits since our mechanics themselves were working well:
- More Sanity Reduction Cryptid Cards
- Heavier penalties through Cryptid Cards
- Specifying Madness/Knockout recovery mechanism
- Resources are an Action instead of a playable card
- Corruption tokens cannot be placed on a failed evidence card
- Clarifying when equipment can be played
- Rewriting the “Play a Resource” Character Action Cards
Our biggest task for the week aside from balancing difficulty, was creating materials for the game. Although it was playable for the past 3 weeks, its aesthetic parts were unfinished and not in line with the narrative we wanted to give our players.
We split forces so that some members worked on the Rulebook and Card edits while other members made the game art and collected materials. We had no major challenges during this week.
On the production/construction end, we worked on:
- Aesthetic edits and card production + printing
- Creating a Box for the game
- Token construction and collection
- Character and time board construction (enlarging the character boards and editing the character abilities)
With all of that said and done we hope that the final experience is balanced, collaborative, and inspires that unique terrifying nostalgia of childhood. We hope that this game is difficult enough to inspire strategy and tension but reasonable enough to still be an active collaborative experience. And finally, we hope that the game is enjoyable for our players.
Author(s): Antrita M., Nora J., Shayla B., Elle T., and Joe Z.
