A card game for English tense learning

As an English learner, I used to be confused by the irregular tenses of English words. For example, “work”, is a regular word. We only need to add “ed” at the end, and it could be past tense and past participle tense. But the “know” word, its past tense is “knew”, the past participle is “known”. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to remember these words. But the efficiency is not good, and the process is very boring. And it not only got me thinking, can I make this learning process more fun? So I decided to try to incorporate it into a game to gamify the learning process.

How to play?

So how can I solve it in a game? I have tried to merge the tense elements into a card game. We can see this is the part of the card set. There are different words with their different tense version (represent by different colors). So the rule is that players use a single card each time, and the next players use the same tense card or the same word but a different tense card to respond to the previous card.

The introduction of word cards and the basic rules

Also, some black cards have their unique function, and they can be used to respond to every normal word card. In this part, I chose UNO as the reference. But I add a type of black card called question cards. Players need to use the correct tense card to respond to the blank of the question card.

The introduction of black cards

Player Testing

After I designed the first version, I used it on the first test. However, I got some bad feedback. The first game was finished in a really short time. We have only played 6 rounds — less than 3 minutes in total. This player said she thinks the game is too easy because there are too many tips on the cards, like colors and the tense name on the cards’ corner, so she cannot learn anything from the game.

So on the second version, I tried to make half of the word cards’ to be gray and remove the tense name. Meanwhile, I reduce the number of black cards. So that increases the difficulty of the game.

After the second test, I learned that the game is still too fast can be complete. But because I remove some tips, players need longer thinking in each round, which is good for players’ learning.

At the end of the test, the player said the game was not funny enough. For the third version, I add more function cards with different colors, reduce the percentage of black cards further, and make the card set funnier.

During the third test. The players played 12 rounds. And the process seems more surprised than before. But I still agree, it is not enough for a mature game. It needs to iterate more and refine.

A screenshot of the game

Takeaways

What I was surprised by in this project. Is players think about the education part more than the funny part. During the test, players always gave feedback about learning. But there is only one feedback is about the funny.

This is my first time designing a card game. I realized that balance is a significant part. In the beginning, I thought I should add some interesting features to the cards to make them more fun. But the test told me the game could be complete very soon because it lacks balance, such as the percentage of functional cards and normal cards and the number of obstacles. Balance can make sure that players can feel competitive and keep focus.