Blog Post 3 Prototyping

My game is called Temple Race. It is roll-based city builder game with a race to the finish game secondary. You play as a builder for a chosen Olympic god and must build a temple in your god's honor first or face exile from the city. The game is essentially played by rolling two dice. The lowest number is used to move spaces on the board. Then you must play an action card, which may depend on the total roll of the dice. Income earned from the action cards, or by winning the Olympics race on the game board, can be used to build the four construction cards. The first to build all four construction cards wins.

Session 1:

When playing the game in class, originally the game consisted only roll based income generation. For example, some cards might earn a certain number of coins based on an even or odd total dice roll, etc. The game was also slow to play as the generation of income wasn't quick and the lower cost cards were easier to build than the higher cost cards. I worked on adding some more income generation methods and added board spaces with loss of money.

Session 2:
When playing with a friend, it was recommended to add way to differentiate the player cards from each other, which led me to adding a logo onto the character cards for each character as well as a special card. He also recommended that I added betrayal to the game so it would make the game more fun. I ended up adding some action cards that were choice cards for the player. One example is that the player can choose to pay 1 coin to the bank or they can steal 2 coins from a player, but if they choose to steal then they must lose their next turn. Another card example is that the player who draws the card can choose another player to forfeit their next action card draw.

Session 3:
By session 3, I had about 60 action cards and I printed the game on cardstock so that it was durable and less difficult to rip. Adding the logos on the cards helped identify the characters easily. Here, the two players chose Zeus and Hades to play. I also added some special spaces on the Olympics race board in order to cause players to lose income before winning the Olympics race money, which can help players who are behind not be even more behind if the race is won by a player who is ahead. The game took about 20 minutes to complete, and we almost finished a complete playthrough (I lost, of course, so the game is not rigged).