At our first team meeting, we played the game Azul, which heavily features placing tiles onto a board. Our initial project idea, Queen of the Forest, began with this idea of tile placement. Specifically, we chose to use pentagons over more conventional tiles because they don’t tile well. We figured the lack of reliability of the pentagon shape would lead to the game embracing an experience of chaos. To further this experience, we experimented with placing the pentagons over a square grid. Then, we could have asymmetric multiplayer hidden-movement gameplay where one player secretly moved on the square grid while the others moved along the pentagons. The goal of this original game was that of a collectathon: to travel across the board and retrieve treasures while avoiding the hidden player.
At our second meeting, we played Forbidden Island because it was a tile exploration game we figured could give us a better sense of our own tile exploration gameplay. We really enjoyed Forbidden Island, and it gave us many new ideas for game mechanics for our style of game, including tile destruction, co-op gameplay and strategizing, and a class system that gives each player a different purpose.
After playing Forbidden Island, we started our first playtest of Queen of the Forest. Unfortunately, we found the game wasn’t fun, as there weren’t enough elements present to make it interesting. Though the chaos of pentagons was appealing, having only five sides was not conducive to developing strategies. To make matters worse, the Queen, as we had dubbed the hidden player, could move around without any real strategy and destroy tiles and players rather easily. Though this destruction revealed her position, there was little that players could do with that information to plan against her or run away. We experimented with a mechanic that allowed players to hunt the Queen, but it ultimately flipped the power dynamics, with the Queen running instead of hunting and ending the game without any collection. Also, the goals of both the Queen and the other players were somewhat unclear, and all of the goals we experimented with failed to lead to engaging gameplay or strategy.
After expressing our concerns to Ash, we decided to ditch the game and find a new way to get the core elements of our game across. We used hexagons instead of pentagons, made the game completely co-op, and added ruin tiles and environment cards that destroyed the tiles instead of the Queen. There are three levels of intensity for these environment cards – the deck starts with only the level 1 cards, but as these level 1 cards are drawn, higher level cards are added to the deck, so the environment effects get more intense over time (a deck enhancement mechanic borrowed from Aeon Trespass: Odyssey). In these three decks, there are also “Reveal Treasure” cards that show the players which of the six ruins hold the treasures they need to collect.
When we playtested this new variation, we found it much more engaging. Since the treasures are not revealed immediately, there was a give and take to spreading out all across the board or making an effort to go straight for a potential treasure location, each strategy having its own potential costs and rewards. Though we are hopeful about this new game, currently called Hungry Hungry Forest, we still need to playtest it more to balance its mechanics. Stay tuned for our next process post where we will go over this new game in more detail! >:)
