My Own Disease
Completed: 2017
Download rules here: http://tinyurl.com/myowndisease
Genre: Race Game
Platform(s): Board Game
Description: You and your opponent draw a giant creature and race across each other's creatures' immune systems to infect the other with a disease before yours is infected.
Unique elements:
- Your character is the gameboard
- Rules designed in such a way that strategy based on the type of creature players draw is limited, so players may focus on creativity
- The decisions made while drawing creatures drastically changes the way the game plays out.
Awards:
- A+ for originality
My roles:
- Game designer
My goal with this game was to make a game where the player's character was also the game board, but also to design the rules such that the game felt different based on what kind of character each player had, but to keep the play balanced enough that when players did draw their characters, they would base their designs on creativity, not on strategy. This required a lot of playtesting with characters made of many lines competing against characters with very few lines, and testing if there was a dominant strategy in terms of what characters looked like, and refining the rules to make sure that all characters would be equally difficult to infect while still creating different play experiences. Through playtesting, it was found that the vast majority of testers didn't think about strategy when they drew their characters, and the few that did didn't end up being noticeably more successful, which was the effect I desired.