Click this link to download and play my print and play game!

My print n' play version of my game, Lifeform is finally complete. I played the game and revised it so many times, but I am surprised at how little changed in terms of my initial concept. There were several major things added and removed but the essence of what my game is about is mostly unchanged. From the beginning I wanted to make a simple game and I think I succeeded.

Changes in board game:

Many things have changed about my board game that I am in the process of creating. The least amout of changes are being made towards the gameplay, which is reassuring to me. I am pretty sure I have a a solid core mechanic and that the little details need to be worked out.

The biggest changes come with my theme. Originally I had titled the game Paleozoica, a nod to the paleolithic era in earth history. This is when life became more complex and really started to flourish. However, the world of cellular organisms exists to this day, and instead of creating this whole natural-hostorical theme to go with it. I will instead make it a broad theme about life on the cellular level in general. Here is a logo I created:

This will allow the style of art on my game to be extremely minimal. For example, before I was going to have the game board represent a tidal pool, since life formed in the ocean, this would make sense for my paleozoic theme. However, in reality, you don't see that kind of detail on the microscopic level. It would make sense for the board to be dark, and represent the kind of fluid real cells would be found in. The cells will be bright colors, glowing with vitality. I think this design will be more striking.

While cells small clumps of cells are the characters in play for my game, it will really represent life as we know it in general... you are born, you grow, you multiply and you consume. That is what life does and if I can translate that into a board game, I think that would be awesome.

In our Game Design class, we had to all bring in board games. Then we paired up and were required to combine 2 board games into one new one...

Invade the New World! – A mash up game with Pandemic and Settlers of Catan

2 Players

Goal

•  End the game with more points than your enemy in order to earn more of the new world!

Set Up

•  Set up the Catan board so that it looks like this, covering Europe, Asia and Africa, and with all the resource tiles in any orientation, but with the mountains in the same place.

•  Place one “town” piece on the right side of this hex board for each player.

•  Filter out all the monopoly cards and victory point cards in the development card deck.

•  Shuffle and stack the boat tiles and number circles, and stack them on the top and bottom mountains respectively.

•  Then, add two victory point cards into the development card deck, and place them in the middle.

•  Take the thief from Catan, and place him on Mexico City on the Pandemic board, and place the player pieces from Pandemic on Chicago, Miami, Lima, and Bogota.

•  Then place the remaining player pieces on the three leftmost hexes on the Catan board.

•  Place one yellow cube next to each player piece dubbed “generals”

•  Whenever placing one cube or solider on generals, add two to the thief, or king.

•  Get rid of the coal / stone card in the Catan deck, and give each player one of each resource card.

Rules

•  Each turn proceeds as follows.

•  Flip a ship tile, this determines the price of a development card! A 3:1 ? card means you can trade any 3 resources for a card, regardless of type, however, a 2:1 Wheat can only be used with wheat. If the coal ship is flipped, ANY two resources regardless of type can be traded,  but they must be two of the same type.

•  Then, draw development cards that a player purchased.  The knight card adds a single  unit to your army, a Plentiful Harvest card allows you to choose between adding 2 units, bridges or any 2 resources of your choice. The Victory point card works against the players and adds 1 unit to each of the generals and, 2 to the king on the board.

•  Next the players will take their turns. This involves movement across the board, the amount of hexagons players can move depends on the bridges that the players have placed connecting the hexagon tiles together. So a normal movement will allow a player to move units from one tile to an adjacent one, however, if bridges are built on the tiles (at least 2), then players can move across an entire tile and onto the following one. Player only can use one movement during a turn. Players can also choose to engage enemies on a turn as well.

•  Engaging in combat: When to armies of units go head to head, a dice is rolled for each unit that is going against another unit, you continue this until one of the armies has been taken out. When a player destroys an army, the army’s general piece is captured and kept for points that will be counted at the end of the game.

•  Players will want to move as quickly as possible to the end of the board but still take enough time to build a army that will be able to hold up in battle. By the time players move to the end of the board (particularly the Pandemic section) the armies of the generals and the king will have been built up to a pretty large number. The armies also have fortifications that double the amount of points their units are worth. As the armies on this side of the board are defeated, their units will be added to the kings army.

•  When players finally arrive at the king piece, they will be forced to combine their armies in order to take him on. Once the king is defeated, they game is over and points are tallied based on the number of generals/king captured. The player with the most points wins.