Raptor Rumble

Ben and Elle

For our game, we wanted to create a party-style game where one player serves as a judge and players win rounds not by a point system or strictly defined-rules, but by arguing for themselves and having the judge decide. Our main inspiration for our game was the game Trial by Trolley, where players build groups of people/objects/etc. and one player chooses which they’d rather run over with a trolley.

We liked a lot about this game. Firstly, a lot of party games live and die by how many different cards they have, since once you’ve used them all once they aren’t as funny. But in this game, each “track” has three cards and up to two modifiers, which means more possible combinations of cards make them stay fresh longer. We also liked that players had opportunities to modify other players’ tracks to make them worse (this is arguably the most fun aspect of this game). We liked that there were tokens to keep track of who’s the judge and how many rounds everyone has won. Finally, we liked that the rulebook was relatively short; we didn’t want to make a game with a lot of rules. We decided our game should be simple, be about making a combination of cards, and have a way to mess with other player’s combinations.

Elle wanted to make a game about dinosaurs, so we decided on We took further inspiration from the Exquisite Corpse activity from class, as well as an online party game called Champ’d Up, where players draw characters and pit them against one another. In our game, players would build dinosaurs using cards. Dinosaurs would have one card for their head, one for the arms/torso, and one for the legs/tail. To give players the ability to mess with another player’s dinosaur, we took the idea of modifier cards from Trial by Trolley and allowed players to play them on either their own or opponent’s dinos. These modifiers would be beneficial, harmful, or ambiguous. Here are some of the ones we came up with:

We wanted these modifiers to be distinct from normal body features like “sharp teeth” since the head/torso/leg cards would include those traits. Additionally, to give the modifiers more variety than in Trial by Trolley, we added one that allows whoever plays it to swap one body part of another player’s dinosaur with one from their hand. For the body part cards, we tried to base them all off of real dinosaurs. The symbols on the back of these cards use drawings and colors, rather than words, to set them apart, giving the game a more visual, iconographic experience. A lot of our design process was basing our gameplay off of that game, and then deciding which features to keep and which to alter. One thing we changed is that in our game you can’t replenish your modifier cards every turn, you can only draw a new one every few turns. Also, instead of playing in teams that change every round, we wanted each player who’s not the judge to make their own dinosaur each round. We kept the token system to keep track of how many wins everyone has/who’s the judge.

The biggest issue with our development process was the sheer amount of dinosaur body part cards we had to come up with and draw. Initially, we wanted to have more grounded, realistic body parts (i.e. parts of actual dinosaurs) and have the modifiers supply the comedic/zany element but it was hard to come up with many distinct parts that way, so we had to branch out and make a wider variety of body parts more akin to Ark: Survival Evolved than something you’d find at a museum. We also limited the number of rounds in the rules so that we wouldn’t have to make too many cards at the prototype stage. We ended up with around 21 of each kind of body, enough for about 6 rounds. For comparison, coming up with that many modifier cards was much less of a bottleneck. We plan on producing much more polished, high-quality art than shown in the above photo for the final product.