First brainstorms..

Last week, Chris send the Circuit Break proposal to us each over the weekend so that we all had a chance to familiarize ourselves with the idea and brainstorm suggestions for class.  Overall, in class we realized we have a lot of work to do because we are struggling with figuring out exactly what we want the game to be. One of our challenges upfront is that we don’t want the game to be to similar to Ticket to Ride, so we are concentrating on making sure we have different ideas other then collecting cards to move your player. 

Some of our main brainstorming for week one included:

Should we allow other players to actually break peoples built circuits.  We don’t want to frustrate players who spent all that time building a circuit and then have another player just be able to break it.  We had a suggestion to simulate the way power companies work in real life, which paved the way for many other ideas as well.  For example, if we have each player be a company, for example like Verizon, and we use the idea of a company can buy or rent a building and then they own it. (like how one power line can be used by both Verizon and AT&T but Verizon may own it.  So instead of having other players break circuits, we had the idea to let other players pay that company to use their circuit or pass by. 

This helped us see that it would be a great idea to develop a currency system for our game.  We all agreed that having money in the game is a nice way for players to feel like they are working towards winning and everyone likes to get money! Similar to monopoly, except players don’t need to buy and dominate the entire board in order to win.  A player can rent a building and pay the bank and then a player can eventually buy that location.  We also felt it would be unfair if one player rented a building and then a new player came and purchased it, so the new player would have to meet the rent plus the building cost.  We have a lot to work out with the money and how we want it to work into the game, but buying and renting and borrowing power is our starting ground.  We also talked about the E cards, which will be worth $1 and we will also want to have 5, 10, 15, 20, ect which will represented by different colored E cards.  We also need to work out how many locations there should be.  To start off, we want to look at 15-20 and see how far that takes us. 

This week, we focused on the objective of the game to help us determine what we want players to feel while playing.  For example, we want the game to be interactive so the buying and renting will make players aware of what their opponents are doing and require them to work together and against each other at certain points.  We want the object of the game to be to light up as many locations as possible and the game will end once all the buildings have been purchased (fully lit up).  We also want to add in action cards and extra point cards, such as if a player lights up a certain location they will be rewarded additional points at the end. 

--Olivia