Happy Ever After
Happy Ever After
Happy Ever After
By Dan Armstrong
July 16, 2020
Summary
I made the decision to propose on this day, which gave me exactly two months to design a personalised board game and have it made, not counting things such as delivery, playtesting; multiple drafts; even learning basic game design!
Now I'm somewhat creative, play a lot of board games, and had a ton of ideas coming to me, but I'm still a long way off from being a game designer.
With the clock ticking, I completed a few online courses on game design, and embarked on my journey to design a board game.
At the time, I was playing a lot of resource gathering games and figured it would be a relatively simple theme to customise.
This ended up making the most important part of the entire game as my secret quest was to propose to my girlfriend, an objective that was not built into the game, meaning that not only could I not win, but it also provided me with a way to organically pop the question after the game was over.
As well as some other changes made, the game had been completely reimagined from the initial idea.
Each player would now start and end their game separate from the other player i.e. they would not meet up and become one unit.
Throughout the game, cards would be drawn that advance Opie along his track, when he reaches 24 or if a card is drawn stating "FEED OPIE IMMEDIATELY!", the players must pool their food resources to meet the required number on Opie's track.
The final piece of the puzzle was to organise the ever-growing plethora of cards into categories that would benefit the flow of the game.
There were Buffs that could be traded between players and played to positively and negatively affect resources, Locations that allowed players to fast travel to non-parallel location tiles, Events that needed to be resolved immediately such as feeding Opie or resolving a Dilemma, and Artifacts which were either cards a player would need to complete a quest e.g. buy first car, or black forest cards which a player could save up and trade in 5 at a time to obtain an additional black forest token, which had become the way to track how many actions a player can make each round.
Reference
Armstrong, D. (2020, July 16). Happy Ever After. Retrieved July 21, 2020, from https://www.ludogogy.co.uk/article/happy-ever-after/