Giant Gorilla — A Random Storyteller Card Game

Giant Gorilla is a physical card game that I was able to playtest in person, and over a discord call. I initially asked some friends if they wanted to try and get into a call to play it, and I had no idea how it was going to go. Luckily, the games we did went a lot better than I was expecting them to, a lot of players came in with really creative stories. For the first run of the game ever this really surprised me. We were able to get into the game pretty quickly, I had to briefly go over the rules which took about a minute, but everyone during both play sessions was able to catch on pretty quickly. Everyone seemed to have fun playing! A lot of people got creative with their prompts, which led to a few unexpected stories. One of my favorite stories was with the combo “You suspect you’re in a simulation” “in Walmart,” featuring things like “three clones of the yodeling kids,” “Walter Mart,” and a video of a shoe eating chips, it was god damn hilarious. I tried mixing the rules up a bit for a few rounds, such as both players having the same location, the only one that didn’t work was both players having the exact same cards. Overall the core game worked out really well! And I’m looking forward to implementing things like the sabotage cards to see if it adds extra spice.

The main thing I got from player feedback was to add features that allow players that aren’t telling stories to have some form of interaction, such as choosing special conditions for the round or throw in an extra card that they need to include in the story. I was also recommended to consider a slightly longer timer and a possible 3rd card that players need to include in the story. I would like to implement these features and see how they change the game at some point because I can see them working out really well.