Refection of the project

Jerry Wu

Ms. Guarino

English II

April.25.2016

Reflection of the project

For our creative project, we chose to make a board game because at that time, we thought it sounded more interesting. During the time working on it, we met the biggest problem: how can a board game related to the story we read? At first, we researched different kinds of board game, and finally we found out Saboteur which is a card game based on the mine. Then, we spent a long time trying to understand the rule. After we knew the rule, our project is finally started.

We bought the card from the shops, and trying to create our own cards by drawing them on the note card. We divided the work by Leo and Minh draw the cards and I cut the card from the note card into a board game card size. However, this did not work after we saw Minh’s terrible drawing, so we switch the work. During the time making the card, we met another problem: Why the board game we bought looked so strange and lacked a lot of cards. Soon we realized the one we bought is Saboteur 2 and we need a copy of Saboteur to play this expansion. After all, we decided to create the Saboteur game by ourselves.

After all this “lovely” hand drawing, we turned back to think our biggest problem:How to make the game related to the story. This problem perplex us for long time until finally Minh came up an idea. The point is that, we changed the winning rules from People found the gold win into people found the gold win. As the story mentioned, people lived on the lightning Ridge all had an opal dream, they went down to the mine everyday and trying to find the opal. Same as the Williamson family, the father Rex Williams also loved opals. He used to enjoyed his life about finding those valuable stones until he got into trouble while he was searching her daughter Kellyanne’s imaginary friends Pobby and Dingan. He was misunderstood by others on the town, as they thought he was ratting Old-Sid’s mine. As soon as Kellyanne became sick because of the lost of Pobby and Dingan, the Williamson family got to save Kellyanne instead of finding Opals. So we changed the game by adding Pobby and Dingan as goals card and Kellyanne as a special character into our game. Normally, there is normal miner and bad miner in this game. The normal miner’s goal is to find the opal, and the bad miner need to disturb them and have the opal at the end. We made those two types of character as people lived on the Ridge and Old Sid. Beside those. We had make the Williamson family and Kellyanne as the special character. The Williamson family was like the normal miner, if they found the opal they wins. However, Kellyanne was very different, her goal is to find Pobby and Dingan instead of finding the opals. If the member of the Williamson family helped Kellyanne find Pobby and Dingan both of them may win. The point of this game is teamwork and player’s decision I think. The Williamson family can either choose to find the opal to win or help Kellyanne to find Pobby and Dingan. The good miner helped each other to create a route and the bad miner worked together to disturb others. Also you can choose to disturb others if you want to win by yourself at the end. I think this game is base on player’s decision a lot, and how the game will be end depends on the player’s decision. They may learned that teamwork is important and they may probably realized help others is important too, just like in the book, Ashmol made others to find Pobby and Dingan in order to save Kellyanne.

The hardest part of the game is making the connection between the game and the book and see if the connection works in the game or not. None of us plays this game Saboteur before, we even don’t hear it before. We learn how to play and make it into our games and we teach others to play. The final product was finished, but I think it can be better if we spent more time on making the card and trying to make more connections. It’s not because the time was not enough, but we were being lazy and did not spent a lot of time working with each other after schools. Otherwise the project will be perfect. Anyway, from this project we learned design a board game is not very easy, it takes a lot of times to do all this steps:make the rules, create the cards, and see if the rules work in the game, is there any problems(bugs in the game)? I think now I understand the story better since I was keep thinking about how to connect the story with the game and what we can learn from it. What I learned is that, your decision will make the game(the story) ends in a different ways. It is very important to think before make a decision.