Last week in my introduction to game design class, we were presented with a challenge. The challenge being to make a game that involves a ball, but you cannot throw, kick, shoot or flick the ball.
At first glance this seemed to be almost impossible. I actually thought that the assignment was designed to set us up to fail. How can you possibly make a game using a ball with out doing any of those things?
Well, it turns out it is possible. And after thinking about it in a new way, I came up with the most unique game in the class.
Here is the guidelines that we had to follow:
First thoughts:
My group went in an obvious direction with this at first. I had three ideas before the teacher had turned us lose to brainstorm. They all involved a game where you physically play with the ball, in a sports like fashion.
- The first Idea was basically a variant of tug of war. You cannot physically touch the ball but you have to push the ball across the line to the opponents side of the table. My thought was that players could use straws or something to direct their breath and blow on the ball to move it.
- This was a balancing game. The idea is similar to chicken, where you push a person off of the shoulders of someone else. One player would balance the ball on their head and the other person would have to knock it down. If after a certain number of moves the opponent could not knock it down the player with the ball would win.
- This is one involves pushing the ball into a cup without touching it. The idea was to set up an obstacle course of sorts where you could throw an object and bounce it off stuff to hit the ball and knock it into the cup.
Ultimately these ideas got shot down. The more we thought about the challenge the more it felt like we shouldn’t use the ball as the main component of the game. So after brainstorming for the rest of class and no new ideas, I headed to pick up my husband from work and my daughter from school.
The ball challenge taunted me in my thoughts. It beckoned me to create a game but I didn’t know how to use the ball in a non-obvious way. I talked about it with my husband a bit on the car ride home and he shifted my perspective.
He said something along the lines of thinking outside of the ball. Which got me thinking that the game doesn’t have to be about the ball but instead just another component. So I had some new ideas.
When I got home, I jumped on Discord and messaged my group my two new ideas.
- Use the ball as a “box” for the game we create
- Use the ball as a score marker for the game we create
These were some cool ideas but they weren’t a game, or even a semblance of one. I was feeling pretty stumped. But the next day, it hit me.
A few days prior, my husband and I were working on a game together. And the theme idea came up for a mummy in a tomb. This immediately got me thinking about Indiana Jones and I laughed as said, “Is a boulder going to get us?” And we chuckled and moved on.
But as I thought about my game design experience and how to make the ball game, I thought back to that moment. And Bingo! I had an idea for a game.
Boulder Dash (Working Title):
Heavily inspired by the famous scene in Indiana Jones, I set to work designing Boulder Dash. 
The goal of the game is to make it to the end of the track with the most treasure.
Each round the players may take four actions, of the three actions available.
Actions:
1. Run
a. Move 1 space forward on the board
2. Search for treasure
a. If your current space has a treasure marker (the colorful circles) on it you may search for treasure. Simply take the treasure marker and flip it over to reveal your treasure. If it is a treasure you keep it for end game scoring. If it is a booby trap symbol. You lose one action.
3. Trip Opponent:
a. If you are on the same space as another player, as an action you may trip them, causing them to have one less action on their next turn.
After both players have taken their actions, a player rolls the dice and moves the boulder the corresponding number of spaces towards the players.
If the boulder moves on to or past a space that a player is currently on, the boulder crushes them and they lose they game. If the players are on the same space when this happens it is a draw. If both players die, but one player was further ahead, they are declared the winner.
If both players survive, the treasure is added up and the player with the most treasure wins the game.
The Design Process:
My first design was a piece of paper on it with the numbers one through 20 down the center. Each number was considered a space. I grabbed 3 of my daughters toys that were small enough to fit on the page.
My first thought, was to make two decks of cards. One for the boulder movement and one for the treasure. So on index cards I put in varying amounts of treasure and boulder movements.
In the boulder deck, there were cards with a number 1 – 3 written on it. There were more ones than two and more twos than threes.
In the treasure deck, I had 16 cards with 0s written on them, 8 cards with 1s, 4 cards with 2s and 2 cards with 3s.
In the first play through it was vary obvious that it wasn’t going to work. The boulder didn’t move fast enough and it was very hard to get treasure. Plus, the players started way to close to the boulder.
As you can see from the photos, the version I presented in class is much further than my first iteration.
The main changes I made were moving the players starting position up on the board. I also took away the boulder deck because it wasn’t working quite the way I wanted and instead opted to use a d6 for the boulder movement. This got the boulder going more quickly but still kept the players fairly safe because of the probability on the die roll. I really love this because it gives the illusion of imminent doom but the numbers are still on the side of the players. I also took away the treasure deck and added booby traps. The current distribution is 3 booby traps in the game. It feels like it works pretty well for now but it might be something to come back and look at if I continue working on this game.
Overall, I think I was pretty successful at creating a game that involves a ball that uses it in a unique way. Once I started to think more laterally it all fell into place.
I would love to see the games you designed using the same constraints! Post a picture of your game and the rules in the comments. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!
Jacquelynne's Game Design 