Phase One

For this week, the Sustainable Sustainability (Title Pending) team has focused on getting a better understanding of our game’s mechanics and how they can be simplified in order to facilitate player comprehension. One of the first and most critical points noted was parsing down the information displayed on cards. While the information is interesting and pertinent to the themes of civic sustainability, in terms of gameplay, it mostly slowed down play and confused our players. While nowhere near done, a quick and easy fix for the time being has been an overhaul of the terminology used in our game — Sustainable Development Goals and Risk Protection were respectively simplified to goals and protections.

Another item we’ve discussed at length was the transition to a game with more physicality; propping up some of the goal cards in a makeshift “tent” formation had already proven successful in making the game easier to understand at a glance, but we are hoping to make a more involved board with moving pieces to more easily track player’s progress. As of now, we’ve discussed making “tileable” grids so that players could shuffle their cities. We’ve also discussed a city center with space for pegs to track the progress levels of each goal, and swapping out our tiny alderperson cards for a postcard-sized “cheat-sheet” containing information about each alderperson’s goals as well as the actions players can take per turn.

The Week 3 playtest was extremely helpful. A game that was recommended to check out that was similar to our skyscraper idea was Takenoko, which was very apt; its bamboo towers and hex-board are very similar to our own design ideas. Another helpful piece of feedback referred to the disaster cards; they currently are only defended against if the proper protection card has been bought, which comes out to a 1/16th chance of getting the card you need to save your goals. The feedback suggested making the disasters level-based instead, requiring players to invest a certain amount of protections to deflect the disaster, which made for a better game feel and reward for those who played defensively. Additionally, adding clarity to what goals the disasters are affecting would assist as well. They currently have no specific goal, which slowed play as players decided which goal would be removed.

Overall, it was a very productive first phase, and we have a clear roadmap of what we would like to iterate on in the future.