Capital Gambit Process Post

Week 1 & 2:
Our group (Noah, Dylan, Donaven, Rachel) decided to play Coup as our first game of inspiration. During our initial brainstorm game, we wanted to make something that was approachable and easy to learn. There were a few factors we really liked, and some we didn’t. First, we really like the bluffing aspect of Coup, it was a cool twist on player interaction. A few of us had played “bullshit” which is a card game based on bluffing, so bluffing was a bit easier for some of the group. Because you could bluff, everyone had to do some deducing, which was a mechanic we liked. In order to “assassinate” or “coup” players, you needed to pay X tokens to make that action happen. However, money making felt a bit slow, especially if people didn’t feel comfortable with bluffing about being duke. We decided to take this resource management mechanic style to the opposite extreme. This is where we get monopoly (america’s favorite capitalism propaganda) as another inspiration for our game where players need to construct buildings for earning bonuses, and we modeled the theme of our game to feel very corporate/venture capitalist, and we named it accordingly: Capital Gambit. However, we still had one challenge: how do players make money?

Machi Koro

For building bonuses, we took inspiration from Machi Koro as a mechanic for money-making, and again implemented it with a monopolistic twist. After being recommended to play Machi Koro, we thought incorporating dice would be a fun implementation that fits our game well. We settled on a money making mechanic that involved paying X amount to roll the die and earning what ever number you land on as your “investment” in the stock market. Balancing this was quite difficult.

Auctioning

It’s was pretty obvious early on that our game took inspiration from coup, so we wanted to change the way “lives” worked while still keeping the bluffing as a player interaction. One way we did this was by introducing the auctioning mechanic that had a touch of poker, something everyone seems to enjoy. It allowed people to trade one of their cards for money if they were stuck, but also have an opportunity to gain card/win the game if they bought enough cards at an auction.

First Class Playtest

Below is feedback from our first class playtest that we’ve used to help iterate our game:

Clarifications and Balancing

Our first round of playtesting highlighted some parts of our handbook that we either need to condense or make more clear, but overall it seemed people enjoyed it.

Investment Guide and Character Sheets: we should condense the investment guide and character sheet into one possibly

Game Mechanics: Questions arose about the banking system, auctions, and the use of character abilities. For example, the nuances between a forced auction and a player-initiated auction need to have more explicit explanations.

Gameplay Dynamics: Suggestions included adjusting the cost of certain actions or buildings to speed up gameplay. Additionally, we heard that our Trump card was too weak, so we need to revisit the characters.

Clarifications and Mechanics: there was still some confusion on the rules, so we want to clarify game actions further, like the order of operations between using a character ability and investing, and making it more clear that players can buy more cards for X tokens.

Terminology Adjustments: Changing “buying” character cards to “hiring” fits our game better, as well as rethinking “auctioning”.

Economic Adjustments: The suggestion to start players off with more coins and to make buildings cheaper/accessible and allow players to engage from the get-go was one we heard a couple of times and are reworking.

A photographic short story: