Entry 9 - Silver

In the last class we presented our modified version of an existing board game. I chose to take the game Battleship and give it a more fun, aesthetic, variable, and interactive twist. The result was Obsidian Sea, a treasure hunting game that pits two pirates against one another in a race to unearth the other’s treasure. The play area is a 3D landscape of half land, half water, located within a pirate treasure chest. Each player uses a magnetic dry-erase board to hide their traps and treasure for the other player, in addition to tracking player movements with their dry erase marker.

The feedback accumulated for Obsidian Sea seemed to be overwhelmingly positive, which is always flattering, but high marks only serves to make me more scrupulous of anything less. While I know that I can’t please everyone, I was less than thrilled that only half of respondents said they would buy the game. It’s one thing to fill out a survey and say you had an enjoyable experience and a game was great, but it is another to put your money where your mouth is. I would have been interested to see a “Would you buy this game with your parent’s money?” question. Of course I kid, and perhaps it was a fun game but just not their genre. While receiving almost all 5’s across 8 surveys, we did receive some constructive feedback. A recurring note was that the game became increasingly difficult once you lost crew members and could only search one tile at a time with your captain. This mechanic was by design to give impact to the loss of crew members and evolve gameplay. Unfortunately, the intent may have backfired as players claimed it could become tiresome, frustrating, or repetitive, which is exactly the feeling from the original Battleship that was trying to be avoided. One suggestion presented was to create multiple win conditions, which I agree would be a great addition as long as it was action based and not simply a second treasure. Lastly, it was proposed that more traps be added. The issue with adding more traps is that more crew members would need to be added or the trap rules would need to be changed. A larger crew would be too easy considering the number of tiles, and changing the trap rules would decrease effectiveness and be complicated to implement considering they are stagnant discoverables. Overall though, I am incredibly happy with how the game came out in the amount of time allotted.