"Create a full-scale board-game for display and checkout in a production-ready box-set. Designers should showcase a combination of multiple mechanical design skills in a product that showcases their abilities and development during this course."

Mildly Suggested Themes:

"The End" 

or

"Designer's Choice"

There is no enforced theme for this project. You're officially on your own and should be terrified of the curse of freedom.

100% OPTIONAL Challenges for Inspiration:

"Curiously Strong" - Your entire game fits within a single Atloids tin.

"Maximum Efficiency" - Your box-set game components utilize 3D printing, laser cutting, and large format printing services from the CPL.

"This Sparks Joy" - Your box-set design includes organizational features such as dividers, custom trays, and holders for all components to be easily re-boxed or used during gameplay.

Go to Spielbound, your favorite comic/hobby shop, or even Target and take a peek at the absolute chock-full walls of boxed board games available for purchase. Everything ranging from family classics, to kid’s intro-games, all the way to legacy edition grand strategy Eurogames is at the ready for consumers to make the change into gamers. We are living in a golden-age of tabletop gaming in terms of creativity, availability, and (most importantly) SALES. It’s not nearly enough to have a smokin-fresh idea. You need to be able to execute and make in-roads to professionalism.

Our final project will focus almost entirely on the preparation of an art-grade box set game of your own design and make. This cumulative project will test all skills and understanding of design undertaken in this class so far. Students will engage in market and subject research, design, and production on an absolutely strict timetable meant to evoke a real-world production pipeline on a contracted schedule.

One particular note here is that you will not be keeping (nor will you be returned!) any portion of the physical game submitted for this project. Where materials and equipment can be sourced from the UNO Creative Production Lab, lab fees will be utilized to pay for production costs. Each student has been allotted $40 for the production of one box-set game that will be submitted for the Library collection. Should you wish to keep a created physical copy of your game you will either budget it within your project production costs or be willing to pay for additional materials and CPL equipment-use out of pocket. Partner projects will benefit from a combined budget allotment.

This effort will result in your game being listed on an internationally searchable database equivalent to a published thesis work. Your game will be available for checkout and play by the UNO and wider Omaha community alongside a collection of major published games. Your name and project can then be found by fellow designers, academics, potential clients, employers, and publishers as a complete and archived proof of work that has faced the scrutiny of public availability. 

Given this, you will be producing two simultaneous but entangled versions of your game. One will be the physical box-set above. The other will be our usual print-and-play digital submission through itch.io. Thankfully, as you’ve hopefully found so far, the creation of print-and-play game documents fully enables and eases the creation of physical components. The net benefit of a dual approach is enabling players to globally and freely play your game while having an open-access portfolio piece with a direct web link.

There will be no enforced theme, genre, nor specific mechanical inclusion in this project. However, the few requirements of the rubric will be strict. 

You must include one mechanic or core feature from a prior project made during this semester within your new game. Do you really like a prior mini-world or narrative setting? Does a specific gameplay mechanic beg for expansion or use within a larger system? Take this opportunity to showcase your own success without any of the previous walls.

The entire game must fit within a shelf-secure and fully-closing box no larger than 10”x10”x3” and no smaller than 2.75”x3.75”x1”. Will you fill the box to the brim with components and a large board, map, and ruleset? Perhaps you want to try your hand at making something small, focused, and polished. Recognize that your primary player audience will be fellow college students and let it guide your production outline and decision making here.

The new skill to undertake here will be to see how your new game fits within not just the current Criss Library collection, but also as part of a wider game industry position. We’ve been creating genre and mechanics-specific games up until this point where I have been giving you lists of games that fit the mold for inspiration. I would strongly hope that many of you took those links as key guidance for design inspiration and problem solving. I know better. This time around you’re going to have to seek existing experiences both as a way of figuring out how you can do something similar or better, but also to discover what gaps might exist in the current play field. The tabletop game industry is awash with goblins, magic, eldritch horror, and war. It is also a place of vastly differentiated takes on standards and wholly original concepts that simply couldn’t exist in a digital space or non-interactive realm. What unique subject or experience are you going to bring to the stage?