Hi student,

I hope you're enjoying this class!

It'd be lovely to see what you're hacking, read what you're thinking and if you wish, offer some feedback. To make this easier for you, I made a project template. Just copy-paste it and hack into your own project :)

Enjoy!

M

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I'm hacking: game title (even better, include the link to this game on BoardGameGeek)

PART 1/3 → PLAY-NALYSING

Let's play and analyse the game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics of this game!

MECHANICS

What are the (main) rules of the game?

DYNAMICS

What behaviours and strategies emerge from the game mechanics? What are players thinking?

AESTHETICS

What’s the experience of playing this game? What are players feeling?

PART 2/3 → PROTO-HACKING

Add some pictures of your prototype(s) and explain what you’ve done (and the thinking behind it).

PART 3/3 → PLAY-TESTING

Add some pictures of your prototype(s) being tested by yourself and/or other people. Explain what you observed, what feedback you received, and what changes you’ve planned in response to the playtests.

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EXAMPLE: HACKING CARCASSONNE

I'm hacking: Carcassonne

PART 1/3 → PLAY-NALYSING

Let's play and analyse the game mechanics, dynamics and aesthetics of this game!

MECHANICS

What are the (main) rules of the game?

Players take turns placing tiles they draw from a pile, 1 tile per turn.
Each tile can feature a city, a road, a monastery, farmland or a combination of those.
When you place a tile, you must attach it to at least one other tile that has already been placed, so that roads connect to roads, cities connect to cities, etc.
After you placed a tile, you may deploy one of your “workers” on that tile, to claim a new road, a new city, a new monastery, or new farmland.
Each player has a limited number of workers. When you deploy a worker on a feature (road/city/etc), it will stay there busy, until that feature is complete.
When a city/road/farmland is complete, then the worker/meeple on it scores points for its player/employer and crucially, you will get your meeple back so you can redeploy it in future turns.
The game ends when the last tile is placed (or there are no more tiles that can be legally placed) and at that point, players tally up their scores and of course, whoever has the most points wins.

DYNAMICS

What behaviours and strategies emerge from the game mechanics? What are players thinking?

Before you place that tile, you’re thinking “how can I maximise the features of this tile? where could it yield more points for me” and you’re analysing the map to decide where the best opportunities are.
You’re also thinking about your workers, “should I put a worker on this tile? Is it going to be kept there long? Is that wait worth the points I might score?”
Then as the game progresses, you have to decide if you want to prioritise short projects, such as a small city or a short road, which will give you few points, but have more chances of being completed (and freeing your workers for new projects once complete) OR whether to embark on long projects, like a big city, which could score you a lot of points, but keep your workers busy for longer and might not be completed by the end of the game.
And then sometimes you might want to place your tile or worker in a way that disrupts other players (but in most cases, you’re focusing on your own projects). There’s also the option to cooperate with other players on single projects: if you both have a meeple on two ends of a road, or two separate parts of a city, when those are completed you both score points.

AESTHETICS

What’s the experience of playing this game? What are players feeling?

There’s a sense of building something together, almost collaborating at the expansion of the same map.
At the same time you’re competing to claim new features, and occupy as much as you can.
But there is no direct damage, no attacking your competitors, but rather exploiting the new opportunities that come up, and occasionally/rarely blocking someone else.
For some players, it can feel like a solitary race, working on your own projects in your own corner(s) of the map, and for other players it can feel like a collective project, in which you sometimes work together, other times you sabotage each other’s efforts. By the end of the game, there tends to be a sense of wonder and satisfaction looking at what you have built (as opposed to what you have destroyed, which is common in other games)
A critical player could also reflect on what Carcassonne tells us about urban planning. The cities and roads we’ve built are not optimised for mobility or for better living, they’re optimised to maximise profits, usually in the short term (sounds like the so-called “free market” doesn’t it?)

PART 2/3 → PROTO-HACKING

I want to hack this competitive game into a cooperative one.

I also want to make a game for my brother and his (now) wife, as a wedding present. They are both doctors, not gamers.

So the game has to be quick, simple, playable by 2 people, and possibly inspired by medicine/surgery!

What if players were doctors, working together to revive a seemingly dead carcass, one tile at a time?

Share your game hack :) by hacking this project template! - image 1 - student project

Started by sketching out abstract versions of all the Carcassonne tiles.

Decided to reduce them to ~50 tiles, because a small deck means a short game, which I think will suit the intended audience. It's great to have such a specific audience of 2 in mind!

Started playing solo with the tiles, exploring at first the core mechanics, and how it feels if the goal is simply to maximise score. Not bad, it feels creative and calming, very similar to a jigsaw puzzle. But there is next to no tension in the game, as you can’t lose. So how could players lose? I am already deploying Carcassonne “workers” to track which organs/cities and roads/vessels are open. In the surgery metaphor, “workers” represent open wounds, where the patient might be bleeding.

Here’s an idea for a mechanism to lose points/game: haemorrhage!

When a haemorrhage event is triggered players lose points, as many points as they have open wounds. This means we need to start with some points (to avoid losing the game immediately, and unfairly if a haemorrhage happened early) and we also need some mechanism to score points. We could keep the Carcassonne scoring rules, +1 for each road/vessel you complete, and +1 for each city/organ section you complete (so a large city/organ with 5 sections would score you 5 points).

Time to playtest with people!

PART 3/3 → PLAY-TESTING

We quickly realised that triggering a haemorrhage at the end of each round doesn't work. It adds an accounting task at the end of each round. This means you stop playing and have to look out for little red tokens scattered around the operation table, which is time-consuming. Also, this wouldn’t scale with different player counts.

What if we have a randomised haemorrhage trigger? Let’s try with 1 every 6 tiles (Too many? Too few?)

This feels much better! The threat is now embedded in the deck, so each time you draw a tile, there’s a little fear it might trigger a haemorrhage. Much more tension!

Share your game hack :) by hacking this project template! - image 2 - student project

Also we talked about the functions of organs IRL, like the eyes or the brain, and how these could be represented in the game system. The brain tile could give you a brainy ability, like rearranging other tiles. And the eye tiles could let you see further, which means revealing 2 tiles instead of 1.

The brainy ability seems to be broken. The eyes though! We really liked their ability, how just having a choice between 2 tiles gave our play extra strategic depth. We wondered if we could make this a general rule, so that on each turn you have a choice between (at least) 2 tiles.

Turns out two tiles per turn work really well. But I noticed that when given a choice between a haemorrhage tile and a normal tile, everyone chooses the normal one. Sounds obvious. Well that’s a problem, because if you have obvious choices in a game, then you’re not really playing, you’re just following the rules. So how could we make the choice between a haemorrhage tile and a normal tile more interesting? How could we make someone want to pick the haem tile?

New rule: heart attack! If you have a haemorrhage tile from the previous turn(s), and you draw a second haemorrhage tile, then you all immediately lose! Pretty brutal, but that gives us a very strong incentive to get rid of haemorrhage tiles, to avoid the risk of a sudden death. That changes the game dynamics: when you have a haemorrhage tile in your hand, you’re thinking “Should I play this now and lose some blood, or play safe but risk losing the whole game next turn?” and that’s quite an interesting problem to grapple with.

Share your game hack :) by hacking this project template! - image 3 - student project

We tried a few games with the heart attack rule, and it felt like we had a decent prototype :) so a few days later, I started writing the rulebook!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GaPdBcIu-Q0Ty72RuH8Mz8_VsE9vq09ronhEqFl-FRU/edit?usp=sharing

Matteo Menapace

Coop Game Designer & Educator

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