Game Design and Production Blog 9 - Farm Game (INFR 2330) (INFR 2330)

Can YOU tell the seasons where certain type of fruits and vegetables grow?!

Hello! Welcome to my blog!

Today, I will be talking about a farming assignment given to us for the Game Design and Production class.

With this assignment, we were to make a game in order to teach people when which fruit and/or vegetables are in season…

When I saw this, I thought to myself… "HOW?!" it was a really rough start… but after a while of thinking, I came up with a good thought.

If one was to teach about fruits or vegetables within four seasons, why not make a board with four seasons? So I created a rule-set utilising this idea.

In this game, a board is divided into four, and there is a deck of cards in which represent the seeds. Every turn, a player is able to draw a card (draw a seed card) so that they could be able to plant another fruit, or vegetable.

Here is a rule-set going further into detail about the game:

What is the game?

You’re a farmer trying to get the most amount of harvest before ten years end.

Objective

Go around the board twice, planting, and harvesting. Whoever has the most harvest, wins the game after going around the board twice.

How to play

The board is divided into four sections: summer, spring, fall and winter.  You start in the spring. In the spring, you can plant and harvest vegetables, and fruits. This also counts for the summer. In the fall, you can only harvest mushrooms and hay. In the winter, you cannot harvest anything, except some special herbs that may grow regardless of season.

Every season has 20 spaces to travel in. In each season, there are a certain amount of dirt spaces. However, the only proper seasons in which you could plant and harvest foods is in the spring and summer. In the spring and summer, you can plant any seed in the dirt spaces. You can only harvest after 5 spaces pass within each season. If out of a season, the next time you come back to the season in which you had planted your seeds, your harvest would still be alive for you to harvest.

There are a deck of seeds. Each turn, everyone draws from the deck of seeds. Each seed has a name on the card so you know what you are planting, and if you can or not. Each time a seed is planted, you take a marker so that you know what type of seed it is, and that you planted it. On the bottom of the marker ( a tile with two sides), you get your harvest.

You are only able to plant and harvest during your turn.

Before each season, there is an event space of which everyone passes over. There are four decks for these event spaces. The event spaces can be either good or bad. For example, if you land on a space before winter, a card that you could draw could be like “oh no! Winter has come too fast, all of your previous crops have shrivelled up, and died.”

An example of a good card could be, if before summer, “all crops that you planted in the spring have grown because of the sun! you may harvest them all.”

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With all of this, I thought I was done, but as I thought about it after I had submitted it, I thought of more things to add to the game.

Thanks for reading my post!

Kazekumaru -- Peacing Out!

Questions to consider:

1. If you like the rule-set, would you like to see it made into an actual game?
2. What other changes do you think could be made to the game from just reading this?