Cadence

The challenge: Design a board-game adaptation of any video game.  This game should be playable without the player having to design anything!

My first idea was to turn Mario Kart into a board game.  Mario Kart lends itself perfectly to a race to the finish-style game, and most of the elements from the digital game could be directly ported to a physical game with little abstraction.  While not difficult to get a prototype up and running, I think creating a genuinely fun board game from Mario Kart would prove challenging, but I wanted to try something less obvious.

My second idea was to transform the battle and progression systems of Paper Mario into a card game.  I had a lot of ideas, but ultimately, I felt like my game design was  becoming too similar to a card game called Munchkin.  Because of the similarities, I decided not to pursue this idea.

For some reason, the next game the jumped on my brain was Amplitude.  If you derive any kind of joy from rhythm games, you need to track down a copy of Amplitude!

Amplitude is set in a future where street lanes represent musical instruments, and each lane is studded with copious amounts of music nodes.  In this future, people don't drive cars, they drive magic, music-generating vehicles.  These vehicles have the power (some argue the responsibility) to hit the music nodes as they hover over them.  Every hit node adds a beat or note to the song.  If a vehicle hits enough nodes in sequence on a single lane, that lane will jam all by itself for a while.  In Amplitude, the player is given control over one of these vehicles and is responsible for hitting the nodes.  The idea is for the player to hop between lanes, nail the patterns, get the music going, and keep as many elements of the song playing for as long as possible before the song and level ends.  Within each lane nodes can take one of three positions.  Buttons on the controller are mapped to these positions.  Blah, blah.

That's Amplitude.  It's awesome!

After reading about a bunch of alternate reality games in Reality Is Broken, I wanted to create a game that forced players to interact in a very direct manner.  I wanted to crate a social experience.  What I was looking to do, I didn't know how to do with a card or board game, so this design is a little out there.  I took some liberties with the challenge rules by not making a board game, but the idea beckoned.  Who am I to ignore?  The game is simple, requires little setup, and if it plays anything like it does in my head, there should be a lot of laughing.  You'll need a metronome, three or more friends, and enough space to wiggle your limbs about.

For those not in the know, a metronome is a device used by musicians to keep time.

It might look like this.

Or this.

In Cadence (My game has a name!), one player takes on the roll of the magic, music-generating, hovering vehicle while every other player (there really isn't an upper limit) takes on the roll of a lane.  The lane players stand in a row facing the vehicle player.  The goal of the game is for the vehicle player to simultaneously activate as many of the lane players as possible which in turn will create many layered rhythms.  It'll sound beautiful, I promise.

In order for the vehicle player to activate a lane player and get some music going, he/she must first choose a lane player to face off with.  The vehicle player can only face off with a single lane player at a time.  During a face off, the lane player performs some action that the vehicle player must mimic.  Before starting the game, players may place restrictions on the actions a lane player may do, but as far as I'm concerned, anything goes.  Actions can include dancing, singing, hugging a stranger, sprinting to a nearby tree, or even scaring a small child who got just a little too curious about the teenagers having fun in the park.  Whatever the lane player does, the vehicle player has to copy if he/she wants to activate that lane.

This game isn't played with any hard and fast rules, so the success or failure of the vehicle player's mimicry is determined by the lane player who initiated the action.  Upon failure, the vehicle player may attempt the action again or move on to an unactivated lane.  Once the vehicle player has completed the action, the lane player who owns that action starts clapping a pattern to the timing of the metronome.  Clapping continues for as long as the lane player deems appropriate (again, no hard and fast rules).  The vehicle player hops between lane players, mimics their actions, and by doing so, adds more clapping patterns to the mix.  Each lane player must clap a different pattern.

Lane players may also change the action they want mimicked every time the vehicle player comes to them for a face off.  This includes the scenario where the vehicle player attempts to copy the lane player, fails, moves on to a different lane, and then comes back to the original lane player for another go.

Again, the goal of the game is to create music from different clapping patterns.  The music gets more complex the more lanes get activated.  The game continues for as long as they players want to keep playing, or until one of the lane player wants to take a crack at being the futuristic, magic, music-generating, hovering vehicle.

I haven't had a chance to play Cadence yet outside of my head.  I know, I know.  90 percent of the battle is iteration.  But, as you can probably imagine, Cadence can be a tricky idea to sell.  When I do convince some friends to play, I promise I'll film it.

Cadence is a synonym for rhythm, so that's where the name comes from.  Also, to me, cadence sounds serene.  I like the dichotomy between what cadence sounds like and the craziness of the gameplay.

Cheers,

Danny