Balloon Wars and Manhattleships at the Come Out and Play Festival

Last semester, some classmates and I designed a few outdoor games for our Big Games class, and 2 of my games will be part of the Come Out and Play Festival this weekend.

If you haven’t heard of the CO&P festival, it’s an annual 2-day event where folks young and young-at-heart come and play outdoor, real-world games together, turning NYC into a giant playground.
http://www.comeoutandplay.org/

My two games are:


Friday Evening – Manhattleships, South Street Seaport
As part of the Come Out and Play After Dark
http://www.comeoutandplay.org/events/manhattleships/
Battleships on the Manhattan grid. Be the first team to successfully hit each bomb-site on the grid using only basic voice commands. Captains direct their bombers to grid locations over the phone. Upon bombing the target, the next bomb-site is identified.


Saturday – Balloon Wars, Governor’s Island
As part of the Field Day
http://www.comeoutandplay.org/events/balloon-wars/
Balloon Wars is a history of combat told through balloon stomping. A variety of short games can expose players to the varied ways we have battled each other, from asymmetric warfare to the charge, we explore them all through a fun and engaging mechanic that everyone (with feet) can play.

There are tons of games happening both Friday and Saturday, including a family-friendly track meant for kids and adults to play together on Saturday.

I hope to see you guys there!

Time Based Game: ITPville

UPDATE: Because of our deadline to launch the game this Friday, and most of the online development is not complete, we’ve planned out a new way to play the game via email submissions. More on this to come.

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Matt London, Lisa Park, Christie Leece, and I are creating a time-based game in the likes of CityVille. ITPville is a multiplayer online game in which each players’ goal is to dominate the floor with their projects. At any point during the game players have a chance to spend their ‘inspiration’ points on different projects and actions. Projects bare ‘dominance points’ when they are placed in a room. The player with the most dominance points in a room, gets bonus inspiration points at every round. The player to dominate all the rooms wins the game.

Our plan is to build an online interface. You can follow the progress of the code here: https://github.com/michelleboisson/ITPville

And see the live version here (still in development!): http://itpville.herokuapp.com/

People Game Revised: We’re all heroes

After play testing our little game, we make a few revisions. Below is the game description with pictures that we played in class.

Blind Marvel

a people game by Archana Kumar, Elena Parker, Sarah Hallacher, and Michelle Boisson

DESCRIPTION

There are heroes and there are villains, and they hate each other. They’ve been spread out randomly in the town and each needs to help the Superhero and the Supervillain save them. The catch is that both Supers are blind and, naturally, want to kill each other. Also the regular heroes and villains are frozen and cannot move. They must use their voices to guide their blind saviors to them, while trapping their opponent.

RULES

Blind Marvel is a game played with a minimum of 8 people but can be scaled to up to any number of players.

Roles
Superhero (1 player)
Supervillain (1 player)
Heroes (1/2 rest of players)
Villains (1/2 rest of players)

Game Play
The Superhero and the Supervillain are blindfolded and cannot see where they are going. They move around the space trying to collect their teammates. If a Superhero touches a hero, the hero becomes unfrozen and joins the Superhero by directly following the Superhero. The hero cannot move on his own, only with the Superhero. Though the hero may continue to direct the Super with his voice. As the Superhero unfreezes more heroes the line behind him grows bigger.

If a Superhero tries to touch a villain instead of a hero, the villain then freezes the Superhero (and his team behind him) for 3 seconds.

All of this is also true for the Supervillain and the villains.

Line severing
Regular villains and heroes have the power to sever the opposing team’s lines. They do this with a karate chop motion over the line. If this happens, all the players from the back of the line to point where the chop happened, must return to their original place and are frozen again.

Winning
The first team to collect all their teammates wins.

Getting Started
A Superhero and a Supervillain are chosen at random and are blindfolded immediately.

Once the Supers are blinded, everyone else spreads out and are randomly assigned a role of villain or hero. You can use a deck of cards with an equal number of red and black cards, then hand them out. Or you can count off.

MATERIALS

A large space
A blindfold for each Super
A way to randomly assign villains and heroes

Blind Marvel: A People Game

Archana, Elena Parker, Sarah Hallacher and I are weorking together on our first assignment for Big Games. The instructions are pretty open ended. We are to come up with a game that could accomodate a large number of people.

During our first brainstorm, we realized we were all interested in creating a game where the players had to move around but that their movement was limited somehow and physically awkward.

We came up with the idea around a blind superhero who was trying to save the townspeople who they themselves can see but cannot move. They are frozen. The townspeople are scattered accross a field and use their voices to guide the superhero to them.

In addition there’s a blind supervillain who’s goal is kill the superhero before he saves all the townspeople.

When a townsperson is saved, they must follow the hero directly behind him. He can still use his voice to guide superhero.

We playtested this game with a few curious folks one night to get a feel for the game and get feedback from outsiders.

Feedback:
– the townspeople wanted more power
– add more strategy to how we collect people

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