It seems like our son is getting into designing games. This isn’t so surprising: he loves playing games and anytime we introduce him to one, he gets right into it. IT was only a matter of time before he started hacking, modifying, and trying to build his own.
In fact, the other day he actually sat down and spontaneously designed his first unique game:
The other day, he spontaneously sat on the couch and, without a word about it to anyone, he designed a game—and I mean he designed it almost completely, from start to finish! Unsurprisingly, at least some of the mechanics are inspired by one game that we recently starting to play with him: King of Tokyo.
However, instead of kaiju attacking a city, game is Pokémon themed: he has accumulated several books indexing nothing but Pokémon types and varieties, and he even has a card set that we use for Korean-language spelling games. This has given him an encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon types, to the point where he included apparently accurate information in the game about the types of transformations (or “evolutions”) each Pokémon type is capable of undergoing.
Seeing all that effort, there was really nothing for me to do but sit down and help him lay it out, so that he could try the game with his friends—some of whom we know would love the game, if they could only understand it. Besides, it was another bit of practice for me with Affinity Publisher, which I’m teaching myself to use for layout now.
As a proud dad, I was going to post it, but my wife suggested it might be better to let our son post it publicly if and when he wants to, and she has a point. I’ll have the files backed up, though, and if he ever does share it, I’ll be sure to post a link from here.
Then there’s the other game design (well, hack?) he came up with yesterday, pretty much spontaneously:
We’ve played the standard version of Tsuro many times. (However, we haven’t yet played the newer incarnations of the game. I guess we’ve played it enough that our son is a little tired of it, but I convinced him to play a short game with me.)
When that ended, he said, “I have an idea!” and pulled the tiles off the board. Then he said, “First, we have to put down all the tiles, one by one.” So we did that. As usual, there was one empty spot on the board, in one of the corners, and he put the dragon tile into that spot before placing all of the pawns beside it. Then he handed me a Lego minifig and explained that these would be our tokens, while our objective would be the collect as many of the “elemental” stones as we could—the pawns, that is.
When he explained the movement rule, it baffled me. It went something like this:
- Place your pawn at its starting point. It has to be at least halfway across the board from the dragon.
- Roll a six-sided die.
- You can move the number of tiles you have just rolled.
- You follow the paths, like in Tsuro, except that when the paths cross, you can jump from one path to another. (The way we played it, there was no cost to jumping, but we talked about changing that to costing 1 tile’s worth of movement.)
- If you go off the edge of the board, you’re bounced back to where you started.
- If you hit an impasse, you’re stuck where you land.
- When you arrive at the Dragon tile, you can claim one of the Elemental Stones for yourself. Each stone has its own power that is usable only once during the match, after you have collected it.
- Red pawn—Fire Stone: it lets you choose a starting position closer to the dragon than usual.
- Black pawn—
- Green pawn—
- Clay-colored pawn—
- Gray pawn—
- Blue pawn—
- Yellow pawn—
- White pawn—
- After claiming a stone, you start again, usually from at least halfway across the board. (But see the note on the Fire Elemental Stone above.)