Overview: Strategic tabletop board game inspired by Snake.

Design Goals:

• Strategic play and meaningful choices.
• No elements of randomness.
• Replayability.

How they were achieved:

• After coming up with the initial idea, I gathered some board game pieces and tested it out with a friend.
• It initially didn’t play in the way I intended, but I iterated on the design, tweaking rules to combat problems that appeared in each new version.
• Each new version of the game introduced new issues that I needed to overcome, but eventually I landed on a version that I’m happy with!

Takeaways:

• You don’t need a lot of choices in any individual turn to have depth. It’s more about the sequence of choices over the whole game. This also leads to less choice paralysis on any individual move.
• In games with very few rules, even seemingly small changes can have big effects on gameplay.
• In a game like this, playtesting is the only way to prove if any idea works.

Team size: Solo

Role: Game Designer

Project length: 2 months