Free War (BoardGame)

Free War is a board game, which my classmate and I created in our CS 108 class.

Session 1(in class):

Before we played this game, this game didn’t have rules. We just did whatever we wanted to do to make our token to move on the board by rolling dice. After few movements, we realized that this was not fun at all. We needed to add some Aesthetics to make a fun game. We started to have a discussion for adding fun into the game. We came up with an ideal to label a question mark in the square on the board to award or punish players. We thought this would make players interacted with the game system. We started to put question marks on the board. However, new issues rose to us: How many question marks on the board? Where were we going to put these question marks? We limited the number of our question marks to no more than 10, and we put them at least few steps away from each other.

After we created our question mark, we started to make cards for awarding and punishment. However, we faced few new issues such as that how to make these cards, how to determine a win or a lose position. We went back to our game concept, which we wanted to create a RP (role-playing) game. Therefore, we came up with level and HP (health points) in our game design. We also set each player to Level 1 and HP 10 to start with. Then we created four cards based on the concept of Level and HP such as Level-1, Level+1, HP-1, and HP+1. After a player picked a card and finished reading the card, the player needed to put the card back to the pile and shuffle them.

After we had our basic rules, we started a new game.  New issues rose to us. Where were we going to put the token to start with? Who was going to go first? After a few minutes discussion, we decided to put a token at a corner to start with and rolled a dice to determine who was going to make a first movement. We also limited 2-4 players for the game.

This game was fun for a while. During the play, we also added attack rules to our game.  But we moved our tokens all directions (left, right, up, down and diagonal).  So we decided to make some mechanics for our movement. We limited the diagonal movement. We only allowed tokens to be moved left, right, up and down. The tokens also could not move back into the same place in one turn.

Session 2(at home):

I brought the game back to home. On the Saturday, my friends went over my house. I told them to play the game with me. I set up the game, and I spent a few minutes to tell them what rules the game had so far. After I told them the rules, one of my friends said that you should make the game more fun with some weapons. Actually, my classmate and I mentioned about weapons in the game at the end of our class session. So I draw a gun and a knife as weapons. What the weapons could do in the game? My friends suggested that the weapons could power up an attack to make more damage to others.

Then my friends and I started to play the game. In the middle of the game session, we lost track of Level and HP. I realized I forgot to write down our Level and HP on a paper to keep track of them.

We reset up the game, and start it over. This time, each player had his own paper to keep track of his Level and HP. During the playing, we slowly discovered the strategies of the game.

We played two times for the game. The first time took us about 30 minutes to finish. However, after we discovered the strategies of the game in the first play, we spend more than 45 minutes in the second play because everyone was critical thinking and trying to find a way to win the game.

After finished the plays, I thought I could make the game more challenge by adding more punishment cards into the Prize/Penalty pile. So I came up with skip two turns, HP-5, and Level-5.

After I had added all new punishment cards into the Prize/Penalty pile, I ruined the fun of the game. Most of the players were “suicide”.  I removed these punishment cards out of the Prize/Penalty pile after we finished the playing.

Session 3(in class):

My classmate and I set up the game. Then, we started to talk about the rules of weapons. We came up with a gun and a knife. I mentioned what function I gave to the weapons over last weekend. He also mentioned his ideas about the weapons. So we combined our thoughts and came up with a new rule to each weapon. For the gun, it had a range of 2 steps, and it also increased damage by one plus the difference between two players. For the knife, it didn’t have the benefit of range, but it could increase damage by one plus the difference between two players.

In addition, we also modified our rules for attack. In order to make an attack, a player must next to another player in the position of right or left or up or down. The player only could fight one of other players (if there are more than two players next to each other). When two players were in the fighting mode, they were going to roll a dice to determine a result. If the higher rank player won by rolling a large number, the lower rank play’s HP was deducted by a certain amount that describe in the rules. If the lower rank player won by rolling a large number, the lower rank player dodged the attack, which means nothing happened to the lower rank player. No player could avoid a weapon attack. So the only way for a lower rank player to attack a higher rank player was by using a weapon.

We also added few cards into the Prize/Penalty pile, such as skip a turn, move 3 more steps.

Then we started to play our game. During the play, one weapon question rose up. If the weapon couldn’t be applied at one turn, could the player keep the weapon? After a short discussion, we modified the rules for weapons, again. We set a limitation of keeping weapons to three turns. If the player didn’t use the weapon after three turns, the weapon needed to put back to the Prize/Penalty pile and shuffle the pile. No player could have multiplied weapons at the same time.  

After most of the rules were created, I enjoyed playing the game. I think this game is a simply and a fun game. If you have time, I recommended you to play it!