Back in October of 2021, I was tasked to create a card game for my, aptly named, Game Design class. This was truly my first venture into designing a game. When I found out my task was to design a card game, I was disappointed. Mainly because I tended to not care for physical games. Video games were all the games I knew, and all the table top games I knew were either from early childhood, which were bland, or the more complex games I’d see on YouTube like D&D. The only game that I could toss somewhere between the two, that I knew of, was Uno.
Part of our task was the game mechanics and the other part was theme and appearance. Thanks to my history with reading and writing, I had little trouble with that. In fact, we were told of two unique was to approach game ideas: starting from the mechanics to develop a story, or start from the story and develop mechanics from it. I chose the latter, mainly. However, when it came to choosing mechanics I relied heavily on what I knew from Uno. In fact, the Interrupt card is basically the Skip card but twisted to fit how the action state works.
The general idea of the game is to end it with the least amount of fudge possible and ideally have those fudge be worth the fewest points. It’s like golf in terms of winning. The current player can play up to two action cards and non-active players can play reaction cards at different times depending on the card. The game goes for x rounds or until all the fudge has been claimed. On it’s own it can be fun, but I am rather proud of the story I made for it.
For the story background I basically thought of random things you’d see in real life like chairs, television, grandparents, cars, burgers, and other things. Eventually I settled on a crazy aunt who is good at cooking, but has terrible ideas. I wanted the game to invert the traditional victory condition of having the most point, but wanted a funny reason for it. To that end, the player slowly accumulates Auntie’s Fudge which comes in five different flavors. The simpler the fudge, the less points its worth. Normal fudge is 0 points, Almond-Banana fudge is worth 1 point, and Lemon-Craisin fudge is worth 2 points. These fudge are generally ok to eat. It’s the last two fudge that are the worst, worth the most points, and are really undesirable to keep even in concept…
County Fair winners Broccoli Fudge and Fish Fudge. Worth 4 and 5 points respectively.
In a sense, this game appeals great to children as most children don’t like veggies or fish in the first place. Granted, putting either in fudge is what makes it gross to adults, too. This motif is what I find makes the game most interesting on the surface, and many of my play-testers agreed. Unfortunately, I found that it’s very easy to overlook the story and focus solely on win conditions when playing a card game, so the idea didn’t fly as much as I had hoped.
Alongside development of the story and theme, I flip flopped with the mechanics. There were two mechanics that I started with that I wound up removing once the theme became more pronounced. They were the Steal and Deny cards. The Steal card would, obviously, steal from another player. However, given the idea is to have the least amount of fudge, or get rid of your bad fudge, it was a nonsense card that fell out of the scope. The Deny card was removed for similar but more important reasons. It’s ability was to be a reaction card that players could play as a reaction to deny a player’s played action. Denying an action was a bad idea in terms of the player actually wanting to play or do any actions in the first place. Hence its removal.
Ironically, the Deny card actually got split into two different cards: Interrupt and Deflect. On the active player’s turn they can play up to two action cards. The Interrupt card can be played before either the first or second action to effectively remove said action. The Deflect card can only be played when the active player targets you. It then forces the active player to choose someone else.
When thinking of these mechanics I thought about how a conversation would play out over a dinner table. I recalled how, in movies, kids would make excuses to share their undesirable foods with their siblings. In fact, the actions the player has are all based on making excuses. The action cards the active player can play are: Give, Swap, Burden, and Ask Auntie.
Give is straight forward. Based off the line, “I think you’d like this more than me.”
Swap is based off the line, “I think you’d like this more than that.” Of course, you don’t truly know what kind of fudge they have until you take it in hand and have a good look.
Burden, which forces the target player to draw another fudge, is based off the line, “Auntie definitely want’s you to have more fudge.”
Ask Auntie is a powerful, but dangerous card. It forces all other players to draw a fudge. Based off the line, “Auntie? Can everyone else have more fudge?” To which she’ll say yes, of course. The dangerous part is that Auntie takes a moment to think and asks the active player to do something. They draw an Event card and either Give or Take to/from the player to their left or right, or Take a fudge from Auntie herself. Aka the pile in the center. A bit of a gamble whether or not it helps you, but it definitely causes the other players to draw more fudge.
Of course, with the mechanics being based on a table conversation, the two Reaction cards, Interrupt and Deflect, are also based on theoretical excuses.
Interrupt, the ability to block one of two actions the active player can make, is based off the general abilities families have to talk over each other. An oh so common trend, but in this case certainly intentional.
And finally, Deflect, the ability to force the active player to choose a different target then themselves is based off an easy line. “No, I don’t think so.”
All in all, there are three types of cards: Fudge, Action/Reaction, and Events. Each are explained as straightforwardly as possible and were refined over a number of playtests. Every playtest was done with different folk and had a good amount of feedback. Got cheat sheets made, which aided the players in learning and understanding the mechanics, and made multiple revisions for the rule book.
Attached below are all the relevant documents that I created during development. Primary among them is the GRATIS which was are final submission document with all the project details. Alongside it are the Rule Book, Cheat Sheet, and a standalone pdf of the Flow Chart.
