Monster's Kick

 My partner and I was just brainstorming ideas about making a fun game, I looked at his laptop's background and saw a Pokemon theme, so I came up with a game related to monster's duel. The rules are simple, in a 8x8 board field, players start at the corner, up to 4 players, move by rolling a dice to collect objectives: the small squares, battle if two monsters are next to each other, the one with higher number on the dice can kick the other monster back, a monster dies and is eliminated if it is kicked out of the board. With the objective, players can get powerful bonus such as: double damage, faster movement speed, forced knock back, plus one shield or move back to starting point.

After drawing out the board and placing the objective randomly, my partner and I started to try it out. I try to get as many objectives as possible and quickly move to the center of the board, my partner did the same and he luckily got double damage which is too powerful, he rolled 4 which becomes 8 after the bonus and I only got 3; I got knocked back 5 tiles and out of board. After the quick game, we figured out that the double damage bonus was just too powerful to exist, so we change it to double knock back (only double the difference).

Then I got home and played it with my cousin several games, I luckily got the double movement bonus and picked up all the bonus before my cousin even get anything. And with the huge resource, he definitely has no chance to stay on the board. So we came up with the new layout for the board, which places one free bonus near each players, and more environmental tiles: river and mountain. Players cannot go through the river and got slow down by the mountain, which they have to pay two points on the dice to move 1 tile, these effects are not affected by the knock back.

With a nearly complete game, I came to class on Wednesday to play with my classmate, figured out this should be fun when it is all fair and square. However, even we picked up all the objective, we are all smart enough to stay in the middle of the board, which makes it very difficult for either of us to knock the other out. Therefore I think with two players, each players can control two monsters, and therefore they can do combo move, combo attack with make the game more fun and fast.

The Resistance Session Report

Last week, our 6-person group played a game named "The Resistance" where we have to do 5 missions together but two of us are spies. Each mission, we sent out the number of people according to the number in the mission track circles: 2, 3, 4, 3, and 4. Successful missions are missions where we got all the "Success Mission Card", failed missions are the ones that we got one or more "Fail Mission Card."

We started to play, the card with the fist, and a blue star inside a square above is the leader card. Our leader would read a prompt so that the two spies would know each other but our four real resistances would not.

First mission, required two people, our leader proposed the guy in the middle, sitting opposite of me, and her to go on the first mission. We all agreed, because it was just the first one, and no one would risk to get revealed with a 50-50 chance. Like we expected, our first one was successful.

The second mission, we need to choose 3 people, two other guys in the left and right, sitting opposite, and me were chosen. We failed this one with one fail mission card.

The third mission, required 4 people, the guy on the left with white T-shirt and me got left out. This mission ended up failing too by one fail mission card. This is our first time playing this game, we as the resistances did not how to divide our team properly to get the spies, so we have to gamble our play through the fourth mission which requires three people.

In the fourth mission, I proposed to choose our leader, the guy in the middle, sitting opposite, and the girl sitting on my right to go. It turned out that it was a successful mission and I was all positive that all three of them were our guys, resistance, because the spy only need to fail this one and they won. So I continued propose three of them and me to go to the last one (I am a resistance for sure).

However, we got all approve vote (we should get two reject vote from two spies if they wanted to win, or one or two reject votes from two resistances that were left out). We go on with the final mission and it turned out to be failed, our leader is one of the spies, she just wanted to play to the fifth and did not fail the fourth mission.

This game is really hard to play as a resistance, it only required one fail card to fail the whole thing, but if we continue to play it more often, I think we will figure out how to do it properly. It was really fun, wonderful social experience from all the playing and talking.

Arcade Games

At first, it was really hard for me to choose any games to play. I rarely come to arcade center and play game, as I remember I came there less than 10 times therefore all the games seem strange and not familiar at all. I looked at all the games' title and suddenly found one of my favorite childhood game: Tetris. Then, it took me five minutes to figure out how to start the game, there are three buttons on the left corner, and I need to click "Insert coin" for credit, choose "Player 1" to play for my turn. All the shapes and rules are the same, but at first I did not know how to rotate the shape, only move it right and left. I had to try every single button on my keyboard to figure out which one is used to rotate, and it turns out to be the "Control" button.

The original hardware has one big circle button to change the shape, and one control stick to move the shape right or left. The PC emulator uses arrow buttons on the keyboard for left, right movement and "Control" button for shape changing. We can also press down to make the shape go down faster. It was a little bit hard at first, but when I get used to it, all things seems simple and familiar like the game I played when I was a little boy. I am not a good Tetris player but always have fun playing it.