The Grand Poobah Iterations

The Grand Poobah

 

 

In today's lecture, after discussing our findings from the previous week's reading, we started looking at the game 'The Grand Poobah' with the aim of iteration around the 'space of possibility' and 'pacing' from "Space of Possibility and Pacing in Casual Game Design - A PopCap Case Study" by 'Marcos Venturelli'.

First Play Through - Original Game:

The game itself was fairly simple. One deck of cards shuffled and face down, one player (from four or five) becomes the Grand Poobah (players choose), that player then turns the top four or five cards face up based on the number of players playing, the grand poobah then distributes those card to whichever player he likes (including theirself). Players then tally the scores from the round (red cards count for scoring points), the grand poobah keeps track of these scores each round, and then finally voting begins to decide who will be the Grand Poobah for the following round (decided by black cards). The first player to reach 70 points wins.

Red Ace - 10 = 1-10 points respectively.

Red J - K = 10 points each

Black Ace - 10 = 2 Votes

Black J - K = 3 Votes

Red Ace - K = 1 Vote

The game was fairly fun to play for a short while, however due to the Negative Feedback Loop in the game, towards the end it became tedious due to the loosing players gaining more points to overtake the winners which repeated itself throughout the game. This caused the game to take a long time and it didn't let the winner pull off in front at any point meaning anybody could win, there was no point at which loosers could prepare to lose and the winner could prepare to win. The drop in the dramatic arc of the game ("Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics" - Marc Leblanc), was so sudden and in some cases unexpected that it didn't give players the desired effect.

Implemented Iterations:

Our iterations for this game were all (but one) theory based as we didn't have time to implement them during lecture.

 

Our actual implemented iteration was for players to receive 3 'hidden energy' cards at the start of the game which the players could choose to use whenever they like. These cards would be used to swap out the card dealt by the grand poobah. An example of the ideal situation to use these cards would be to swap out a Red Ace that was dealt (as these only score one point and only gain one vote), with a Red King from your hidden cards (this instead would cause the player to score 10 points).

 

We never finished playing this version of the game as we realised it didn't work in making the game more enjoyable, but from this iteration we realised that to keep this element even and workable, the hidden card needed to be randomly picked from the deck's royals otherwise a player could end up with all bad hidden cards. To balance this, each player would have 2 hidden cards rather than 3.

 

Iterative Ideas:

 

The ideas I came up with for possible iterations were:

 

• When the grand poobah distributes the cards, they distribute them facedown so that nobody can see what is dealt before tallying the points and casting the votes, this would cause blind voting. An alternative to this would be for the only player to see the delt cards would be the grand poobah.
• Another form of hidden energy, that goes against the powerful negative feedback loop, would be for the selected winner of the voting stage to gain a token for each round voted. These could be used when the player likes to empower the amount of votes they cast in a round (the player can choose to keep these hidden from other players for extra strategy).
• A player states who they are voting for and then roll the dice (hidden from other players views) and only reveal the outcome once each player has decided and rolled. The amount of votes is decided on the dice roll per player totalled.
• Players could play to 100 points, for the first player to reach every 25 points (25, 50, 75), they can choose to knock out a player of their choice. (I also thaught about the idea of countering a 'knock out' if they still currently hold a hidden energy card - this would be used if the knock out idea was too powerful once tested).
• When a player becomes the grand poobah, they gain a seperate token. Once 5 tokens have been collected they can be traded in a set amount of points.
• Players could have a set amount of lives each (10?), for each round the player who is last on the points list will loose a life. Once all the lives are lost, that player is knocked out of the game.

Conclusion:

From these iterations, I would have play tested each one to see if they work - making adjustments as necessary. But from the one iteration they we did implement, we realised how hard it would be to get around the negative feedback loop in this game. This was the main feature in the unaltered version and was an extremely powerful tool, to try to change this or removing it from the game would potentially make the game completely different.