the INITIALs (A Game with only 18 Cards)
Aims and Objectives
More and more abbreviations are used in daily communications both in the Chinese and English world in recent years, such as “IDK” for the whole sentence “I Don’t Know”. But for those who are not familiar with specific context or culture, an abbreviation can be expanded to everything, e.g., for the example ‘IDK’, it may also refer to “important duck killer” or “I drag Kaiser”.
Inspired by this fact, this game is designed as a breathtaking competition in which players need to motivate their imagination to expand different abbreviations.
Process and playtest feedback
At first, there’s only the wild version, and no additional rules were added except what to do if someone raise up an unreasonable sentence. Many problems were shown by playtesting.
1. Sometimes there would be a stasis as no one can figure out a way to connect the cards;
2. Someone tried to use the same word which can be widely applied (e.g. small, I), continuously during the rounds;
3. In the more players version, there was always someone(s) who cannot participate in as much as the others, and they would tend to give up along when time went by;
4. When came nearly to the end, the one who was about to win would have to hold more than 15 cards in hand, which is not a comfortable experience;
5. It took time longer than expected, as most of the times one of the players can take back all of the cards, thus it can not be very fast to come to the end and decide the final winner;
6. In the version of the English playtest, players with high familiarity with `the language were more possible to react fast (which is as expected though, as this is a game relying strongly on language using).
Also, I was cautioned by David for making some simple visual marks on the cards, to distinguish the top from the bottom, for preventing players from being confused as some letters are symmetrical with each other.
Accordingly, rules were adjusted and added, details can be found in my video. But the unbalanced participating problem still exists and can not be ignored after all the adjusting.
Under the tester’s suggestion, a different rule, “each player says an answer, and finally, the person who raises the most interesting answer takes all the cards”, is tried. It is a good way to get everyone involved, but also adds subjectivity to the success or failure of the game, making it demands more on the participants (e.g. you have to understand the meaning behind the sentences everyone puts forward, including those unfamous ones), and for each round players need to wait for everyone to complete their answer and organize a vote, which makes a single round of playtime much more longer.
After trying and adjusting, the final version kept the adjusted first version as a “wild version”. A different way to play called the “mild version”, which makes every player have an equal chance of participating in the game, was added as another choice for players. Besides, for two to three players, they can specify at the beginning that one round ends when the sentence increases to how many words. However, this version has been no more tested, and it is not sure what kind of problems may occur.