Brooke Milan

Survival Board Game – Fall 2014

Your plane crashed. Only a few of you survived. You don’t know where you are. And help might be coming. At least you hope so. If you can just survive long enough to find and repair the airplane radio and call for help…maybe you’ll make it. Maybe none of you will do anything too crazy.

 

Debarkation is survival board game with optional co-op and a procedural generated game board. A lot of the inspiration for this game game from Betrayal at House on the Hill, especially the game board mechanic. The main objective was to survive five in game days, though we are still trying to find alternate objectives within this. Whoever is left at the end of the game wins. Co-operation is highly encouraged, but maybe you want to be the last man standing. Maybe you just can survive without eating the guy next to you. So with that in mind, there are a lot of courses of action and it becomes a game not just about surviving, but about communicating, both in the game, and out of it.

This was the first game made by my group Kannibal Koalas and it came with a lot of group effort and trying to figure out our strengths and weaknesses together. I really realized here that board games could be just as fun to design as a digital game and this was probably my favorite project with this team. One of my favorite mechanics I designed and worked on for Debarkation was the crafting mechanic. Players could find wood, rocks, rope and other items while playing and they would actually use tactile sticks and pebbles and twine. To craft a shelter, they had to stack 5 sticks on the map in a shelter. To craft a weapon, they had to tie a pebble and a stick together. Of course, there were also found items from the crash, but these items game the players the ability to build and touch items during the game. Another other awesome mechanics that I helped with was the ability to set fires and burn things down, the event cards, rules for tying up players, and the ability to eat other players.

Another group member made a great backpack card that each player would have in front of them to track their heath, hunger, how much they were carrying, and remind them about crafting. This went through a number of iterations as all of us had input, crafting changes, and we created a better key for items.

My Role:

• Designer
• Writer

Team Size: 5, Kannibal Koalas

Tasks/Responsibilities:

• Lead Designer/Writer of setting and story
• Wrote design doc and rules
• Designed mechanic for procedural generation of board
• Designed physical crafting component and turns

Skills:

• Creative Writing
• Technical Writing
• Mechanics Balancing

Inspirations:

• Betrayal at House on the Hill
• Survival games