Snakes & Ladders Iterations

Week 2

This week's lecture consisted of the group discussing our findings from the week's previous read (which can be found on my previous post: http://critgamestuds.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/bookarticle-readings.html), and then moving onto iterations for the classic game of 'Snakes & Ladders'.


Snakes & Ladders:

As per normal, we started by playing the original game from which we would try to identify areas that we could work on and make ammendments (hopefully improvements) increasing fun and replayability.

For our fist iteration we decided to make the snakes 'fightable'. To do this if a player landed on a snake head, they would roll the dice against the opposite player (who would be rolling for the snake), if the snake's roll won then the player would move down the snake as normal plus another 2 squares back. If the player won the roll then they could ignore the snake head. To add a strategy into this we also added in two way movement, meaning that on the player roll they could decide to move either backwards or forwards. An example of this would be if the player rolled a '5', if moving forward they would land on a snake head they could get the chance to stay there (on beating the snake's roll) or they would fall down 2 levels. Or the player could move backwards still putting them behind the opponent but not as far as the snake would have taken them.

Our next iteration was to roll an exact number to finish, making it harder to complete while getting more competative at the end. We also wanted to increase the board size but there was not enogh room on the paper to do this.

From these iterations we decided the game was still too heavily based on chance, so using 'Doug Church's tools', we wanted to give the players more 'Intention'.

Our next iteration was to take out the dice for movement. Instead we obtained a pack of playing cards, using all decks we used cards 1-6 and the 4 Kings. We shuffled this smaller deck and then dealt them out, four per player to begin with. We decided that movement would be based on the numbered cards and Kings would be used to climb ladders or counter falling down snakes. Every time a card was played (one per turn), that player would then pick up another as replacement so that four cards were always in hand. A player always had to move if they could, not allowing players to choose to miss turns. We also decided to keep in the previous iteration of finishing on an exact number.

This iteration worked really well, even though the cards dealt were random, we always had four cards in our hand to choose from for movement.

Our final iteration was to incorporate Doug Church's tool 'Story'. We came up with the idea of players choosing at the start of the game to be either a 'Firefighter' or a 'Snake Whisperer'. If you were a firefighter, you would climb ladders and fall down snakes and if you were a snake whisperer, you would climb snakes and fall down ladders. We also used the idea of King's being able to counter an opponenets king when used for climbing.



Conclusion:

Overall through our few iterations, and through playtesting (including another person from outside our group) we decided the game was now much more fun to play and more competative.