Yesterday, I attended the latest GLS “Game Jam” — again, it was a lot of fun, even if the development of this game was much rockier than the previous week’s. This week’s theme was “loneliness,” and our product was a game entitled “Lonely Face,” a card game designed by me and Moses (apologies to Moses for linking to his clearly as-yet-unconstructed site, but it’s hard to resist). We designed this one, like the previous week’s, in a one hour timeframe — sixty minutes from the naming of the theme, to finding a group to work with, getting materials to develop a game, hash out what the game’s rules are, and do any preliminary playtesting before unleashing it on everyone else.

After a brief but useful Keynote introduction by Kevin, Matt, and Ryan on some of the principles and design paths for us to make sure we consider when constructing a game, Moses and I decided to go for a card game this time, for no real reason other than we both seemed instinctively drawn to cards for some reason. I was interested in laying out the cards in a grid initially, and from there, we tinkered for a while with trying to use the cards as a gameboard somehow:

This didn’t really go anywhere, and started reminding me far too much of last week’s game, “Temptation Island.” Though that was with Kevin and not Moses, I found myself gravitating toward making the same game — after all, the end state of our game last week was to isolate one player on their own “island.” The game would have been perfect for this week’s theme!

But, fiddling around some more, Moses and I worked toward the idea of trying specify a working end state for the game in which the losing player has something which we thought to call a “lonely hand.” A decent idea, perhaps, but then defining what counts as a “lonely hand” (A hand with no face cards? A hand with no hearts?) became difficult, especially when trying to craft a game in which the probabilities were such that a “lonely hand” would be hard to achieve in the game.

We stuck with the grid, however, and developed a game which, like last week, involved ripping off a commercial game — this time, it was Bejeweled. We decided to go with a four by four grid and three cards in each player’s hand:

… and the central mechanic of the game is to either swap out cards from one’s hand with cards on the grid, or to flip cards (a la Bejeweled) with other cards on the grid, to match up pairs of face cards:

Hence the name, and hence the analogy to “loneliness” — the successful player of the game builds up pairs of “people” (face cards) and hearts to, y’know, make them less lonely. It’s a little clunky, but works.

We stumbled at the end state of the game, essentially adding in a few other mechanics (matching up Hearts and Spades) as a means to make the game still have meaningful play once all the face cards were gone. Moses and I only had time to briefly playtest it, and while it’s not terribly smooth, I’m happy that we were able to design something decent within such a short period of time.

Anyway, another fun couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon designing and playing games with the good peoples of the Games+Learning+Society Initiative. I’m certainly going to attend more of these “game jams,” but I’m going to have to start challenging myself — for two weeks in a row now I’ve crumbled under the time pressure and ripped off elements of other famous games (Apples to Apples and Bejeweled). I need to get the ol’ creative juices flowing, so maybe in the coming days I’ll cogitate on new, original, and interesting mechanics to try out next time.