Unit 2 Postmortem (Group 11)


Game Summary: This is a competitive card game. The goal of the game is to make a skeleton in order to gain control. To make a skeleton, 2 arm bones, 2 leg bones, a tail bone, a back bone, and a skull are required to be on the player’s field. Once you have the skeleton, you have the choice of continuing the round to have a chance at earning double points or stopping the round there and scoring the points.


Target Audience: It is a two player game, for ages 40+. This is a fairly simple game, and simple card games that are mostly “mind-gamey” definitely appeal to the older audience.


The creation of the game went fairly well. To be honest, with the dinosaur theme we were given, the only thing I could think up was to do something with bones. The first idea I came up with was very similar to the one we presented, in that you make a skeleton and have the choice to control the game. At first, I really wanted to make several sets of skeletons, and maybe even have bones that were only compatible with certain other bones. But that’s a lot of work, so that was scrapped almost immediately.


I ended up taking the reins in the project since I had a clear view of the game I wanted to make for this unit. As a result, my partner was kind of on the sidelines. It was mostly my fault, I kept being like “Oh I can do this part.” and my partner definitely felt guilty for not doing much. One part I kind of left to my partner was determining how many cards should be in the bone card deck. When I made the first version, I made the amount of cards really large, and that turned out to be not so great because our playtesters ended up getting bad hands easily. So I left it to my partner to figure out the cards and he cut it down to a much more manageable size.


The playtest really showed me how much we left out in our rulesheet. I made sure to underline things that were important. At first, I thought it was fairly understandable, but people couldn’t tell when a round should have ended. One thing we realized during the playtest with another group is that our rule on returning cards to get more was not clear enough. It was not stated whether the taking of the cards or the returning should be first, so we updated our rulesheet to say that returning the cards went first. 


Also, a slight gripe: the playingcards.io we used for playtesting got really messed up. A common complaint on the first rulesheet was that our playtesting room didn’t have enough cards in it, and I found that odd. I, and probably many other people thought the room would remake itself back to normal. But no, it saves the cards that everyone has, and I can’t recall the cards. The room was in complete disarray after that playtest. So for the second playtest round, I had to put in a warning for everyone to clean up after themselves.


Making the postmortem video went well, as usual (even though I kind of procrastinated on it). It took me a little bit longer than last time, since we have a lot more to say, and I did several takes before getting good ones. Really, the biggest problem when doing these is making the video less than 3 minutes, because we say more than we expect. 

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