5 min to read
Quick Play, Big Fun: Designing a Numboom for Students
How to create a fun experience for players?
When I was designing this board game, I was still a high school student. During high school, my classmates and I were often busy with our studies, lacking long blocks of time to sit down and play lengthy, complex board games. However, we frequently found ourselves with 5 to 10 minutes of free time, wanting to relax and connect with each other but unsure of what to do. This is when I identified a significant customer need: I could design a board game that caters to students’ desire to communicate and unwind during these brief moments of leisure. Before this, my classmates often played UNO. However, the duration of a single UNO game can still be too long for our brief breaks, as players need to finish all their cards to end the game, and often we would have to stop mid-game to attend class. Despite this, UNO has its advantages: it doesn’t limit the number of players, allowing a game to start with as few as three participants, making it incredibly convenient to organize a game. To absorb the strengths and improve upon the weaknesses of UNO, I began designing my own board game. I started with a key question: What kind of experience will players have in my game? First and foremost, the game must be easy to learn with simple rules. If the rules are too complicated, just teaching classmates how to play would consume too much time, which high school students don’t have. UNO’s popularity among students is largely due to its straightforward and easy-to-understand rules. Secondly, the game should have high replayability. The simplest way to achieve this is by increasing the game’s randomness, allowing players to enjoy repeated plays. Of course, I also don’t want players to feel too frustrated when eliminated, as the primary purpose of playing board games is entertainment. Lastly, since the game is to be played with classmates, I hope my board game will also facilitate interaction and communication among them. While brainstorming with my classmates during our free time, we exchanged ideas and proposed many concepts. Eventually, we settled on the current scheme as the foundation: each player has 4 cards in hand, with each card bearing a number among 1, 2, 3, or 4. Each turn, a player covers a card from their hand and flips another card. There’s also a ‘cumulative score’ starting at zero. Every time a player flips a card, the flipped card’s number is added to this cumulative score. If the resulting cumulative score is a multiple of 4, then the player is eliminated. For example, if the cumulative score is 6 and a player flips a 2, the total becomes 8 (which is a multiple of 4), and the player is out. Similarly, if another player later flips a 4, making the total 12, that player is also eliminated. The rules of my game are indeed simple — so much so that they can be summarized in a single sentence. The game is also easy to pick up, as everyone knows how to add numbers. Moreover, the pace of the game is very fast; players are eliminated as soon as the cumulative score reaches a multiple of 4, unlike UNO where you have to play all your cards to win. While this rule set seemed promising, the issue became apparent when I playtested it with my classmates: it was too boring. During gameplay, each player’s turn consisted only of covering one card and flipping another, leaving little room for strategic decision-making. The only choice in flipping cards was deciding which player’s card to flip, leading to a lack of variety in the game’s dynamics. At this point, I realized the true charm of game design. As game designers, we need to distill the core needs of players based on their feedback. While the general feedback from players was ‘it’s too boring’, the key as a game designer is to understand ‘why the players feel bored’. This represents the fundamental difference in thinking between players and game designers. Indeed, the current rules are not entirely without merit. During playtesting, I noticed some interesting aspects that I hadn’t anticipated during the design phase. Since players must flip a card covered by another player, they often try to glean information from others by asking questions like ‘What is this card?’ or ‘Will I be eliminated if I flip your card?’. Clearly, the current rules do indeed promote interaction among players. Furthermore, when players are eliminated, they don’t feel discouraged; instead, they attribute it to bad luck and are eager to play another round. This indicates that the overall direction of the rules is correct. What we need to address now is the issue of limited decision-making opportunities for players. Initially, it was challenging to come up with a good solution: more complex rules could offer more decision-making options, but they might also make the game harder to learn. So, how could we balance the complexity of the rules with ease of learning? I pondered this while observing my classmates play this version of the game. Then, one day, I saw a classmate sneakily trying to peek at the cards covered by others. That moment sparked an idea: what if we add a rule that allows players to look at each other’s cards? I realized that allowing players to choose whether to look at others’ cards during the game could significantly enhance its strategic depth. This mechanic also aligns with players’ intuition, as everyone prefers not to flip cards blindly. After several iterations, we developed the final ruleset: In each round, a player must perform two actions: either cover an empty space with their card, flip a card from the deck, or choose to look at a card already covered by another player. This new rule added strategic layers to the game without making it much more difficult to learn, striking a good balance between strategic depth and ease of entry.