Noel Grünbaum – Game Designer

Board Game

Duration: 3 weeks 6 november – 24 november 2023

Team Size: 4 Designers

As a group of 4 designers we created a board game with the main mechanic of pushing your luck. Above is the finished game for the board game design course and below is the very first prototype.

Design Intent

The players start on one end of the board and move toward the other, drawing loot cards with money and action cards with events, to determine who has the most money by the end. The core of the game was making the players take risks to decide who would win. Everything was designed to incentivize gambling.

The main driver for this was the lack of information about your opponent’s standing, meaning that you do not know if you’re in the lead or not.

It was difficult to keep the players gambling, and more importantly, feel like their choices had any impact on the outcome of the game. We tried to add as much player agency as possible into the game while still keeping the core the same.

Below is the final version of the rulebook I wrote.

Conclusion

This was the first time I ever designed a board game so I learned a lot during it’s course. We discussed a lot mainly about how to keep the player taking more risks and being more active in the game. I mainly learned about player incentives and how players will optimize the fun out of anything.