P3 Reflection

Nathan Gugel
Serious Games: 377G
2 min readMay 25, 2019

We made a good game, and it is fun. However, I don’t know how well it truly models the system, at least from the player perspective. While the design hits many aspects of the fashion industry and even part of the trending nature of fashion, I don’t believe that our players truly got to think “fashion” while playing. I believe this is largely due to a lack of thematic reinforcement via aesthetic elements. While I did design a game board that fashioned the “continents” into articles of clothing to help solve this, we did not get to put this board in front of a player before the deadline. Fortunately one of my two partners and I will be continuing this project for P4 so we are excited to go farther.

One of my all time favorite board games is Pandemic which just so happens to be an amazing systems game. In fact, early on in the design thinking, we were trying to figure out how to model a board game about fashion and eventually I said, “Let’s make Pandemic, but fashion.” We began thinking of ways to model this confusing, complex, and often arbitrary world of fashion. The fashion industry is subject to the media and so we added an event deck filled with scandals, Met Galas, and celebrity endorsements that change the flow of each turn. Fashion operates in seasons and so we built a round system around the seasons, each of which has different victory point conditions. A designer has to be innovative and exciting to maintain popularity, and thus, any conflicts for territory are handled by comparing your “relevance” stat which can be increased by taking a turn “make a new design.”

This is a territory expansion game which is an age old genre. As a player, I had never really thought much about the formation of the map, but as a designer, I now realize that a map is nothing more than a bunch of nodes with arbitrary connections. One challenge we came across was fitting fashion, which spreads across the world simultaneously, into the usual “spread out from your network” mechanic of other territory games. A last minute (and sadly not playtested) but potential solution that we added to the game is a concept of going viral. By first gaining a majority of nodes in the “internet” (a country accessible to anyone from anywhere) you gain the ability to conquer locations anywhere in the world, not just connected to your current network. With this simple addition we were able to model important parts of both the trending nature of fashion and the competitive nature of the industry.

It was very interesting to by on this side of the creation process of a game related to Pandemic, a formative game for me both as a player and a designer. I have yet more respect for its creator and the beauty of its design.

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