Making board game blog

   When discussing ideas on how to turn 'Mr cheeseys spelling fun' into a board game, we found out that it was going to be hard to make it just as fun to play as the video game version. I was only there for the second session that we spoke about where to take the board game version.

We each had individual ideas on what we could do to turn the game into a board game so we used the Iterative Method to find the best way to go about making the game.

Idea 1
We first discussed a way in which we could make the game a dice game with 2-4 players. We thought about designing a board with rules on certain squares that meant the child would have to pick up a card with a letter on it and then over the process of the game they would build a collection of these cards. Once they had collected enough of these cards to spell a word they won.

We soon discovered that there were many floors to this idea. For example what if a child didn’t collect the right letters and never got the opportunity to spell the word they were aiming for? Or that there was no real aim other than to roll a dice and maybe pick up a card and that didn’t really reflect the game at all or teach the child anything. Also there was the players wouldn’t be able to interact of hinder each other much throughout the game so it wouldn’t be very competitive.

To fix these problems we would of had to place many different rules into the game to ensure that a word would always be able to be spelt (the majority of the time).

We decided to scrap this idea completely.

Idea 2
Our second idea was to have a game that would be similar to 'Shove Halfpenny'.

The game would be for up to four players. Each player would pick a pile of cards and each card would have a word written on the back. The aim of the game would be to push the counter onto the correct space of the board and pick up the letters they need to spell the word on their card. 



We made a quick layout of the board to see if it could work and play tested it. The concept did work but there are a few things we need to alter and we plan on doing that next session.


We decided to stick to our second idea (for now anyway) unless another idea surfaces.