TREASUUUUR
My first project at university was to make a modern interpretation of The Royal Game of Ur. This was a good introduction to design as it taught me about balance, teamwork, and what kind of mistakes are made throughout development.
The Royal Game of Ur is a board game that can be traced back to Mesopotamia making it one of the oldest games that people know. It's a 2-player game where players have to get their pieces from one end of the board to another, first to do so wins. My team and I's task was to make our own version of this game.
We settled on making it 4-player to make it more of a casual game and decided to give it a pirate theme, partially inspired by the university's location in Falmouth, which is known for its docks and ships historically.
After much discussion, I came up with the idea of making it a tile placement game, inspired by one of my favourites, Carcassonne. The way we decided to do this was by having the game feature set islands (shown in green), which the players have to travel across by building bridges using tiles. The goal was to get to the final island where there was treasure.
We made a few early paper prototypes to test the game in person. We decided to bring the island count down to 3 instead of 4 and make the last island longer, after playtesting and realising that the 3 would fit better gameplay-wise. To get through the game the players had to role a d4 to determine how many tiles they would get and could use to build bridges and move.
I briefly touched on the tiles being used to move. To elaborate on that, the tiles had two purposes in the game. They could be used to place bridges, but they can also have special effects, such as movement and ways to interact with the other players and board.
We playtested further using an online tool so that we could test when we weren't available in person. At this time the game had a problem. When bridges were placed, the tiles and their effects were out of the game. This was initially an intended risk-reward system where players had to determine if there were cards they were ok with no longer having access to. It was fun to start with but as the game went on, there was the possibility of running out of movement tiles. The solution for this that we used in later tests was to have the tiles return to the deck once all players had reached the next island. This fixed the issue somewhat but did still became a problem later.
Further playetest showed that our previous solution was only a partial success. Whilst players were rarely ever softlocked, the games could still grind to a hault. We wanted to make a short fun game, but the average playtime was at a minimum 40 mins, which consisted mainly of players using tiles to prevent other players from moving.
There was a fun element of card counting where you could estimate what cards people had based on what your yourself had used for bridges and what effects were most frequently used. Unfortunaley, we were nearing the end fo the project and didn't have enough time to make any neccesary changes.
We had to wrap things up and settled on making the most polished version we could of the game. There was a cardboard version of the game, as well as a wooden version that used cloth for water as a bonus. These were very well made and gave our game a great presentation.
In addition, there were the rules that were made to be on theme, by following an old map aesthetic, similar to the type often seen related to pirates.
The game was played by other students, where our concerns were confirmed. The idea was fun but the execution was no. People often got tired of playing the game as it lasted too long and became a slog. We didn't do any external playtesting which would have helped as we got into a mindset of either not minding the length, or trusting that we'd jsut fix it later.
Also, whilst the tiles had fun effects, they became too focused on preventing the other players from progressing. This game really needed more testing and perhaps a shift in design approach away from agression towards others. Having played and developed other games since, I've had these lessons drummed into my head, but this was the game that started be down the path of becoming a better designer and teamplayer. The best teacher is failure and whislt this may have been one, I'm thankful for what it taught me.