banagrams banana republic
DESCRIPTION
A team response tot he task of "Change the Rules of The Game" in which we changed a rule, refined it, then changed a game mechanic. After several rounds of iterative testing, we concluded with adding a randomly assigned value and mechanic change to the game.TRANSCRIPT
Reinventing Bananagrams
Rosalie Garlow, Laura Simpson, & Shula Ponet
Playtest 1 - Bananagrams
• Tiles face down in the middle of players ("BUNCH") • 21 letters per player
• Connect and intersect letters (from your own tiles) to form words
o horizontal or verticalo left to right or top to bottomo rearrange words as often as desiredo no turns; play independently and simultaneously
• When a player finishes his/her letters, s/he says "PEEL" and everyone must
take 1 tile from the bunch • At any time a player can exchange a letter by putting it back into the center
and taking three in return. They must say "DUMP" • Play continues until there are fewer tiles in the bunch than there are players.
The first player to finish his/her letters shouts "BANANAS" and wins game
Playtest 1 - Results
• Aesthetics: Challenge, Expression, Submission
• Mechanics: letter tiles, peel, dump • Dynamics: work independently,
create your own interconnected words, risk rearranging your letters and beginning again?
• The player who has been in the lead for the duration of the game can easily lose the game
• Easy to learn • With fewer players,
game can go on for a bit too long
Playtest 2 - One Rule Change
• New Rule: When someone says "peel" all players must pick up 3 new tiles, rather than just 1
• Results:o Speeds game up a bito When stuck, 3 new letters can help you more than just 1o Towards end, makes game play more difficult, though still
winnable
Playtest 3- Mechanic Change
• New Mechanic: The only valid words are two, four or six letters long.
• Results:o Adds a level of difficulty to the game.o Eliminated many easy, three letter wordso Towards end, the game had the possibility of being
unwinnable.o The Mechanic was rejected.
• Modified Mechanic: Words could be built in right to left and down to up directions as well as left to right and up to down.
Playtest 4 - Mechanic Change 2
• Results:o Made the players think laterally.o Having more options made
players more creative with word placement.
o Made the game easier in the aspect of building the crossword.
o Added some difficulty for players used to the old rules.
Playtest 5- Sealed Envelope
Modified Mechanic: VERB: Tempting- Option to tempt other players in "single letter" trades. One trade per peel round. SOCIAL ISSUE: Colonialism- When a player has finished using all their pieces, prompting a "peel" that player has the option of taking 3 new pieces from the remaining pile OR to take 3 pieces from another opponents current play. Pieces must be taken from the same word.
VALUE: Liberty/Autonomy- First person to have a "peel" is free from colonalism. No one can take pieces from their current words.
Playtest 5- Results
Round 5 Conclusions:
-Colonialism seems like a good option, but no players made use of it. -Players were too focused on their own words to make use of Colonialism.
-We tried to tempt people with our letters, but no trades were made.
-The rule of autonomy creates more competition - race to first peel.
-We were all nice too nice (and too focused on our independent play) to steal (Colonialism) but we think people would have fun with it!