GCG’s Game Design Challenge: Player Aid

GameCareerGuide has just posted the latest round of its Game Design Challenge, inspired this week by Ian Schreiber. The challenge is to design a “player aid” for the board game Risk. The player aid should be a kind of quick reference that gives a brief summary of the rules. The idea is that new players, upon having read the game rules in full once, now have a quick cheat sheet that they can refer to when they forget how to play. The player aid in this case will be an 8.5”x5.5” piece of cardboard (the size of standard U.S. letter paper folded in half once), with typed text only on one side. The Game Design Challenge is an exercise in becoming a game creator, created specifically for aspiring game developers, students, and other creative minds looking to work through ideas in a fun, collaborative, and sometimes lightly competitive environment. In this case, the challenge is asking the aspiring game devs to think critically about how rules of a game are communicated to the player. Professional game developers are welcome to play, or to visit the community forum and offer insight about how their ideas might be received in a real-world game studio. Readers have one full week to discuss their solutions on a community forum and submit their final answers (see the challenge for guidelines on how to submit). The following week, the best answers and the names of those who submitted them are posted along with some commentary. Entries must be submitted by Wednesday, July 30, 2008. The responses for this challenge will appear the week of August 4 on GameCareerGuide.com. Next week the Game Design Challenge will be on summer break. Look for a new challenge on August 6.