Elemental Wars

This week we created our own card games with the inspiration from another. Much like how Magic the gathering was inspired by other gameplay, we were tasked with creating a new game out of an old one. It was kind of a nervewracking task, especially because I had no idea how to really play Bartok. I have to get hands on to learn, so that's what we did.

We started by playing a couple of rounds of Bartok to fully understand it (mostly for me) then seeing if we drew any inspiration from just playing it. We got some ideas while playing, but mainly just for the theme of the game. The one thing that we for sure knew about this theme was that we didn't want it to go the avatar route, although we do like avatar. As we played a couple of rounds with a theme in mind, we kept trying to brainstorm. The group kept drawing blanks at what we could do, how we could add on and make this a strong iteration, and we kept having issues. We knew that we definitely wanted to have the face cards do something, but when we managed to write out all the abilities it really closely resembled uno. It took a while for us to fully understand what was going on, and a couple of playtests to realize that there wasn't enough variety in the game.

After playtesting some of our fellow classmate's games, we drew a lot of inspiration from them as well. So we thought: why not add teams like Star Cards? But that ended up being too complicated. What if we have piles for each card and you can only play on that pile? How would that make the gameplay? But we didn't. However, we did end up on deciding the elemental 2's and 7's. These cards would add fun and chaos to the game. We wanted each one to have a name, so we did a little bit of research into what would be cool. Originally, we started with just the 2's, but as we thought more about it we realized we might need a little more. So we added in the 7's. 

After adding everything in, it felt complete. It felt like a fun game. After the final playtest, I realized it definitely is a fun game, but still needs work. I wish that we could go in and complete it, but that's ok.