Blog - Weekly Game 2: Warm-Up DJ
Sunday, January 18, 2009Introduction: A Warm-Up DJ's job is to get everyone prepped, excited and ready for when the headliner, peak-hour DJ spins.
In this game you play as a warm-up DJ, trying to get everyone onto the dance floor.
Players: 1 (Solitaire)
Materials:
A standard deck of playing cards and some kind of small tokens, such as coins.
Optionally, some sort of surface to represent the dance floor portion of the club, like a large book, may be useful.
Setup:
On the playing surface, define an specific area to act as the dance floor. The rest of the area is considered to be off the dance floor.
Shuffle the deck and lay the top 10 cards face-down in the area outside the dance floor.
Split the remaining deck approximately in half, and set aside the bottom half (it will not be used.) Of the remaining deck, the player may then look at the cards, and select any 5 cards into his hand. Set aside all remaining cards as they will also not be used.
The player should now have 10 face-down cards on the table, and a hand of 5 cards of their choosing.
At this point, the player can now flip over the 10 face-down cards and begin the game.
How to Play:
The player's hand represents the DJ's music collection, and the 10 cards on the table represent the people in the club, called the dancers.
Playing certain cards from the hand will cause the dancers to react in different ways.
Cards played that are similar to a dancer will attract them to the dance floor.
Similarities include:
-Cards of the same number/face
-Cards of the same suit (diamonds, hearts, spades, clubs)
-Cards that are even numbers or odd numbers will attract one another.
(Evens attract evens, odds attract odds)
Some cards will repel certain dancers, however:
-Even-numbered cards will repel odd-numbered cards, and vice-versa
-Hearts and Spades repel each other
-Diamonds and Clubs repel each other
Note: Face cards (Jacks, Queens, Clubs and Aces) do not count as numbers and therefore are not effected either positively or negatively by even or odd numbered cards!
Example:
Playing a 3 of diamonds will attract all diamonds, 3's and odd-numbered dancers onto the dance floor. (With the exception of the opposite card - see below)
Tokens:
the tokens represent a dancer's level of enthusiasm and endurance.
When cards are played that appeal to a dancer certain amounts of tokens will be placed on that dancer.
Cards that repel a dancer will take tokens away from them.
All dancers also lose a token each turn (as real dancers get tired after a while.)
When a dancer runs out of tokens, they are removed from the dance floor at the start of the next turn.
Token Placement/Removal Rules:
-If an even-numbered card is played, all even-numbered cards get one more token, and odd-numbered cards lose a token.
-If an odd-numbered card is played, all odd-numbered cards get one more token, and even-numbered cards lose a token.
-All cards matching the same suit as the card played get two more tokens.
Cards of the repelling suit lose 1 more token.
-All cards of the same number as the card played get three more tokens, with one exception:
The card of the same number but of the repelling suit as another card is considered that card's opposite.
The opposite card will be instantly repelled completely from the dance floor!
Example: If the player plays a 7 of diamonds, the 7 of hearts (if it were one of the dancers) would get 4 tokens (3 for having the same number, and 1 more for also being odd-numbered), the 2 of diamonds gains 1 token (two for having the same suit but loses one for being even-numbered instead of odd) and the 7 of clubs would instantly lose all it's tokens and be repelled from the dance floor, as it is the opposite card.
Turn Order:
This game has a very specific turn order which must be followed:
1.) Remove dancers that no-longer have tokens.
2.) For any dancers remaining on the dance floor, remove one token.
3.) Play a card from your hand and using the above rules for attraction, see which new cards get attracted to the floor.
(Cards that have been played get set aside and cannot be used again)
4.) Distribute the appropriate number of tokens to cards based on the new card played.
If a card is required to lose a token and has no more tokens left to spare, the card is removed from the dance floor.
Winning the Game:
The player wins when he has all 10 dancers on the dance floor at the end of a turn.
If the player has exhausted all 5 cards from their hand, and all 10 dancers are not on the dance floor, the player has lost.
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Designing the game:
For one of my classes this quarter we had to pitch an expressive game we are to make over the course of the class. One of my pitches was for a DJ game, based on my past work experience as a mobile DJ and my observation that it was very game-like.
Although the professor favored a different pitch of mine for the class project instead, I decided that doing a DJ-simulation game might be suitable for my weekly game challenge.
This game is a little weird, and has some kinks I'd love to work out if I had more time. Balancing proved challenging - the first few iterations were far too easy, and I made the game more challenging. I fear it's a little too challenging now.
The game also relies a little heavily on luck in a negative way, as depending on the initial cards selected, the players can be doomed to fail from the get-go: certain card combinations make it impossible to win. And even when it's technically possible to win, one wrong move can easily doom you to fail. So, if I had more time I'd like to try to play around with fixing those issues.
Another problem comes in with the fact that I didn't have time to have anyone else play test this at all, which is problematic given the rules are a little more complex than I'd have liked. So I hope the game is playable from the above. I'll try to get someone to play test it and update the rules accordingly if there's any glaring holes I missed.
On the issue of complexity, that is another area I struggled with:
complexity vs simulation. The game was intended to simulate what it is like to DJ, and so a large part of the challenge on my end was trying to make a game that simulated the experience as simply as possible.
It's easy to keep adding rules and exceptions, but that makes for a clunkier game, and I wanted to avoid that.
As a result, I think the overall idea came across pretty well, although the game still feels a little abstracted. I'm not sure to what degree that actually bothers me, so I'll mark this game (despite it's flaws) as at least fairly successful in it's goal of simulation. I think the game is far more difficult than actual DJing is, which is problematic, but on the positive side at least it accomplishes my goal of demonstrating that DJing isn't as easy as it looks either.
Labels: weekly game
posted by Brian Shurtleff @ 1:14 PM
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