Race To The Finish

The challenge: Create a race to the finish board game in 15 minutes.

We were to draw a path with defined start and end points, choose a theme or objective, create rules that allow the players to travel from space to space, and finally, think of ways for players to interact with each other.

Here's what I came up with:

The path is straight and travel occurs in only one direction.

The game is played with two players. One player takes on the role of a syntax error.  The other player is the compiler.  Up to this point, the syntax error has lived his entire life on the stack (the play path) with no conflict.  Everything changes for the syntax error when the compiler discovers exactly where on the program stack the syntax error calls home.  The compiler needs to trace its way back up the stack in order to document its discovery of the syntax error.  If this happens, the programmer will be notified of the syntax error, and the error will be eliminated.

Context.  Conflict.  The race is on!

The rules:

• Both players start the game on the same space at the start of the play path (the bottom of the stack).
• Players advance by rolling dice.
• Each turn, the syntax error player rolls one die and the compiler player rolls two dice.
• The compiler player always rolls first.
• Every sixth space of the play path is a special space (signified with shading).
• If the syntax error player rolls an even number, the compiler player must backtrack to the nearest special space before continuing forward.
• If the syntax error player rolls an even number, but the compiler player is already on a special space, the compiler player does not need to do any backtracking.
• If the compiler player reaches the end of the path, the compiler player wins the game.
• If at any point during play the syntax error player lands on a space that is ahead of the compiler player, the syntax error player wins the game.

One of my concerns before doing any playtesting was that the game could potentially end after a single turn.  This would happen if the compiler player rolls a lower number with two dice than the syntax error player rolls with one.  I knew this was possible, but was unsure of its likelihood.

After playing my game a few times, it was clear that my game had serious balance issues.  Many times, the game either ended after the first turn or the compiler player pulled too far ahead of the syntax error player for the game to be fun.

The objective of this exercise was not to create a great, or even good, game.  This activity is meant to get people over their initial fear of being incapable of designing a game.  EVERYONE is capable of designing games.  It takes practice, time, and persistence to design good games, however.

From Ian's blog post:

If you take away nothing else from this little activity, realize that you can have a playable game in minutes. It does not take programming skill. It does not require a great deal of creativity. It does not require lots of money, resources, or special materials. It does not take months or years of time. Making a good game may require some or all of these things, but the process of just starting out with a simple idea is something that can be done in a very short period of time with nothing more than a few slips of paper.

Check out submissions from the rest of the class!

Cheers,

Danny