Exploring creativity through design, art, and conversation.These posts dive into visual ideas, creative experiments, and highlights from my podcasts—where design and creative thinking meets expression

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University assignment: Game design and system thinking

June 18, 2021

I originally posted this on my previous blog before moving house to the online store. I did this for my OU studies. I had to design a game based on a service in my local area. This was back at the height of lockdown 1.0. I could revisit this and update it with vaccine rules and so on but it is what it is. Hope you enjoy, if you do manage to play it please give me feedback.

above: Mock-up of what the game would have looked like if it had gone to print ;)

This is a board game I designed for my Open University studies - the amazing U101 - design thinking module. As part of my final EMA I proposed that the game contents could be downloaded for free and played by whoever wanted to play the game. This is the first iteration of the game after refinements. If you download and play the game any feedback would be appreciated.

The link contains a zip file with all map tiles, rule book and card decks in pdf format. To play download the zip and get the materials printed a print store on the thickest card possible. Cut out the map tiles and cards. Read the rule book. On top of this you’ll need 6 six sided dice, some tokens to mark off store items, boost items on the game board, player tokens, and plastic stands for the NPCs. You can reuse tokens from other board games such as Monopoly for some of these. The other plastic stands for the Spawned NPC characters and wooden cubes which serve as marker tokens throughout can be bought online via the two links below. Alternativley, once you know what it is you are looking for you can shop around the internet to find them if you find that the links below are too pricey.

Here are the required links: