BOON OF THE MOON
Through an ancient civilization, far from today… The night howls with monsters and ill folk alike, with one common fear between the both of the lost souls: the accursed blood moon that beckons for new flesh and bone to serve its twisted leaders. Welcome to Boon of the Moon, a game where you play as an eldritch elder, committed to the idea of destroying your rivaling eldritch elder through monsters and humans bound to you through service. Using trickery and servants from the deep, you dedicate yourself to destroying the opposing side’s control on their villages to fully rid them of their power. One thing stands between you and your opponent that only for a brief moment puts a stop to your desire to destroy one another: the blood moon’s servants. Though you may be mighty and powerful, the moon itself is a patron of its own and creates monstrosities designed to destroy the both of you during combat. As easily as there can be one winner, there can also be no winners.
This is my Game Changers action project that has had two weeks worth of work dumped into it in order to produce what I have today. Game Changers is a class about exploring the design of tabletop games through its many forms of play. We've played a board game called Cuphead, a failed card game from the 90's, and many others you may be familiar with. From this we noted what worked well, what didn't, and if the game had replayability. We've also explored terminology of tabletop games that we had to apply to our own projects. Below you'll find my card game Boon of the Moon, designed from the ground up to be a two player co-op competitive deck builder of a game, designed specifically for an age range of 13 and up. It's a battle card game that takes a good while to play, rounding about 60-90 minutes to finishing a game depending on the players. Enjoy.
Rules And Gameplay
Below you’ll find a mass of things; from the rules itself and then to the design process of the game from start to finish. Firstly, we should go over the rules to settle you in on having an idea of how this game plays out before I force any strange vocabulary. Take a minute or three and see if you can understand these rules.
With you all caught up on the long list of ye ol’ rules, let me take you through the design process of Boon of the Moon. Below you’ll find a compilation of relics of old from a time long, long, ago. By that I really just mean about like a week and a half ago from now.
Coming close to a closing, here's a quick little video to give you an idea of what this game is like and how it's played through a film my friends and I produced.
REFLECTION ON THE EXPERIENCE
I’ve got to say, I don’t think I could have found a better class to have joined. Game Changers is a class that is much more than what it seems. It sounds so good on paper and it’s even better in person. I’ve been able to do just about everything that I love in a way that can be reflected personally of me. Every part of designing this game from the ground up has been from the heart and what I’d like to see as a playable game. The art has been something I've always wanted to do ever since I was a little kid, having attempted to design my own card games before with very crude resemblance to games like Yu-Gi-Oh.
To actually have the materials and time to dedicate myself to designing a card game that was in my full control in terms of personalization for a grade? I couldn’t have wished for a better class. I feel like I pushed myself to really think critically of how I was going to make this game look appealing and to really focus on something original. It took a painstaking effort to get past that writer’s block and I don’t think I would’ve developed something nearly as advanced as I did for this class had it not been for my own personal experiences that I’ve had with tabletop games in my own time, which I really liked about the class.
I started with a few basic questions for myself in order to design a game meaningful and representative of me:
Does it appeal to me? Would I actually buy this if I saw it in a game store?
Is it unique in comparison to competing card games?
Can others enjoy this?
These were the main points I was trying to address. I know it’s a little weird to make a game that appeals to me as my main driving point, but my argument for that is I needed to want to play my own game to want to make it in the first place, I think it’s an important motivator for something as passion-fueled as designing a tabletop game.
I definitely exceeded the art aspect of the game. There are cards that I’ve designed that I think anyone that looks at them can tell the difference in time spent on the quality of them and pick their favorite.
On the contrary, the thing that I’d critique myself on is how complicated I’ve designed the game. This is both a pro and a con, as it definitely narrows the audience that could enjoy this to a select few. Whether or not I like that, I cannot decide. The audience I’m primarily targeting are people that are familiar with the complexity of Magic or Yu-Gi-Oh. There’s a lot of rules and strategy that can come onto the playing field that players could find overwhelming if they’re not used to having to organize multiple things on the field. Had I more time on this project, I would’ve spent a lot more time figuring out how to make the features of the game a little more compact in order to appeal to a wider audience rather than my selective crowd.
That’s not to say that the crowd I’m appealing to is small or unprofitable either. Magic: The Gathering and Yu-Gi-Oh are one of the many biggest trading card games on the market and they’ve got the crowd with a lot of spending money. I want to make my game something that can be taught to those unfamiliar with the trading card crowd with some relative ease, similar to how with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition, they’ve made it a lot more open to newcomers and it’s shown to have attracted people outside of the whole “geek” stereotype. It’s been shown to definitely be possible and I would like to reach a point like that with my game before I decide to market it to anyone.
