Week 05 - *Iterative Design, Sports, & Cards*

Throughout the process of constructing a board game based on a sport, I noticed that there seemed to be a cycle of thoughts our group went through as we played it. It typically went in this order: Think of ideas for the game, implement them, get feedback, change existing content or create new content. This is essentially what the iterative design is from Figure 5.2 in the book, where the iterative design diagram involves a cycle of conceptualizing, prototyping, playtesting, and evaluating. The sport our group chose seemed difficult to turn into a board game at first, but we pulled through by putting most of our emphasis on evaluating. Sure, we conceptualized the board, rules, and overall goal of the game, but it was our reflection and evaluation of the game after playtesting that saved it. Feedback from others was extremely helpful and paying attention to how the game performed while we played was how we came up with new ideas on how to balance the game afterwards. As Macklin & Sharp state, each process of the iterative design is equally important, and an emphasis on evaluation is important because "paying close attention to how other people engage with game prototypes and then translating that feedback into design revisions to be tried out in the next prototype."

Regarding playing cards, I think the easy part about using them as a platform is that you don't have to use the iterative process nearly as much when coming up with a new card game (if using the standard card deck). I thought our experience with Sushi Go!  in class was a fun learning lesson, as we got to learn a new game, but also learn about the versatility of a strategy/luck card game. As we talked about in class, the game was fun because we could use different strategies, and attempt to outplay others, and it was easy to pick up and play for the first time. Overall, the versatility of card games is very interesting and it's impressive how far playing cards have come from when they were first invented.