Print N Play Games

For our Game Design class we were tasked to go explore different print and play games and analyze them.

List of PnP games that I've looked at are:
- Eight On Eight
- Magma
- Rough
- Dungeon of D*

EIGHT BY EIGHT

So the first game is Eight By Eight. In terms of construction for a print and play game it is quite basic. It requires the main board which is a simply an 8x8 grid with another row of 8 on top colored in black, tokens to represent the players, and an eight sided dice. Presentation wise it is very basic and bare bones. As a more casual game it does not matter as much as I'll explain later on, it is a variant of Connect Four.

The goal of the game is for the players to try and get 5 consecutive tokens lined up vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. The game is simply played by rolling the dice that determines the column or row that the token will be placed in (choose one). The opponent is simply tasked to stop you and try to line up their own 5 pieces. This is essentially like connect four but the placement is decided by the dice roll. The twist however is that the players are allowed to "blackout" and cancel out one of the rolls. The cancelled roll will then have a token placed in the black row on top and from then on any rolls that land on that number will force the player to skip their turn.

Overall the game is pretty simple to play and understand. No complex design or anything of the sort. In terms of its design I would definitely have to call it out. For the majority I believe the game does work well enough as a Connect Four variant that adds in a factor of luck. The "twist" in this game however is questionable. If you were to call a blackout, this would cause you to lose your turn and effectively the row and column that is blacked out (a total of 15 out of 64 spots will be lost by a single call out). This simply means you will effectively eliminate your own playing space and give an extra turn to the opponent. The only realistic use of this "twist" is as a desperate measure when you are close to winning the game (essentially a re-roll for your last piece).

The verdict, the design of the twist is extremely flawed and  acts more as a self crippling device if used incorrectly. A possible way to fix this is to eliminate the turn skip of the blackout into a temporary skip for X amount of turns instead if the number is rolled. The game itself without the blackout rules is fine and the twist would have been fine if not for its extreme skip mechanic.


Next,

MAGMA

This next game is a quite simple. No real twist or anything but a good example of a variant done right. Construction is also very straight forward only requiring the board and tokens for the player. The aesthetic of the game is pretty simple with a somewhat visually interesting background for the board (note: the print version for some reason does not include the rust texture seen below, so it becomes extremely plain and simple being plain white).

This game is essentially based on area occupation. The players are tasked to occupy as many spaces as possible using the tokens to section off areas. This game is essentially an extremely simplified version of the ancient Chinese game called "Go". It takes in the same premise of blocking the other player and obtaining space created through the pieces. Go however allows the player to eliminate other pieces by surrounding them whilst this game does not have anything of the sort. The simplification that magma uses is the elimination of "eating" the other other players and simply does not allow a players piece to be placed/ jump over the other players. And the hexagonal board that starts on the two sides also create a very different feel for the game.

Overall the design of this game is straight forward and makes a good simplified variant of  the complex game of Go. There is no real complaints against the design other than that the playing space may become a bit to small for a play through with more than two people. The game does go by pretty fast after one play through as the players get used to the placement style and just tend to move on quicker than usual. The game is balanced and does not require much.

ROUGH

This game is something that breaks away from the two above (not exactly a board game). It is a card game that is based on completing the objectives of the cards so it is essentially a game based on competing in mini games. The mini games ranges from physical challenges, simple trivia, and completely random things that could instantly fail a participant for no reason. Five cards are drawn and the last man standing wins (also eliminated by running out of cards). Honestly there is not much to learn or say about this game other than that it is just pure fun mayhem. The game may have ridiculous balancing issues (such as failing the player who happens to have picked up the "Worthless" card) but down to its core mechanics, what allows it to work is the human interactions. Unlike the other PnP games out there this game does not put you into the shoes of someone else. It purely focuses on YOU and because of that it makes the ridiculous mini games much more enjoyable.

Ultimately this is a very bare bones games with ridiculous conditions and odd specifications. Design wise there is not much to it either other than the balancing of the mini games. But with the nature of the game being "Rough", its overly exaggerated mechanics make it a fun game to play. It may not look the best as it consists of simple cut out cards but it is undeniably an enjoyable game.

Current game consists of a slapping contest till one loses in the background (which will keep on happening in the background till one loses) and a staring contest.

Other game situation examples include: Not being able to talk whilst two people are holding up a table and folding a paper plane to see which goes the furthest! Fun times (played for about 3 hours straight)!

DUNGEONS OF D***

I am just going to say this right off the bat that we did not want to play this game at all. The problem is with the game type itself. Unlike the first three games mentioned within this post, Dungeons of D is a role playing game. The main thing that struck everyone is the instructions. It is a huge wall of text that immediately turns away anyone who is not genuinely interested in the game. It is true that we do not know if it is fun or not but the excessive amount of instructions/ construction that we would have had to do to play this game is deemed unworthy as a pay off.

By design that is a failure in the sense that the game is unable to keep the interest of the player (especially new ones) from the start. The problem is not within the wall of text alone as the visuals that accompanied it is fairly week. An uninteresting blank wall of text is something that most people would rather opt out of and move onto the next time. Visuals are created to help gain interest and lead around the eye but in this case the game failed to do so. We attempted to play this game but did not get very far due to the high amount of information that was needed to start. As none of us were too thrilled for role playing games it did help the cause (nether did the average 1 hour of play time not including setup).

I have to say that the problem with this game is NOT due to its actual game design since we did not go very far. The problem that I want to point out here is the overarching design of board games in general. If the design and presentation is weak, it will immediately turn away new players or lower their interest. There are many factors that separate the game types from your casual games (examples above) to a niche game type like role playing games. The amount of social interaction, the time span, etc... It is extremely hard to bring out everything and talk about design so to sum it up. Everything matters from the moment the player sees the game till the game is finished (I wrote my research paper last year on the same subject as this so explaining it here would not fit).



It is hard to exactly determine the most desirable PnP game due to the niches but so far what makes a good PnP game for me is simplicity and presentation. The faster the game is set up, the less time there is for the players to lose interest. The social interaction aspect definitely became one of the bigger influences within the decision of which game was more fun to play.



Good game design is something that is extremely thought out and is hard to fully explain. I cannot stress how many different factors are compiled together to create something of quality. Essentially everything out there from business, literature, to art requires a large amount of knowledge about design to execute. Nothing happens by accident in the design world.

Go read this book.