Blog Post 1 - Rule Sheet

 Group 3

Our game is a modded version of solitaire. Put simply, within solitaire, the goal is normally to stack cards in their respective suits in ascending order from Ace to King. However, our mod entailed changing the order in which these cards were stacked. Although they would still be stacked in the same order in the bottom piles–alternating colors, descending order–in the foundation piles at the top, we decided as a group to have the cards be stacked in this order: Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10 through 2.

There were multiple different ideas that we initially had throughout the process. One idea we had was to be able to take cards from the extras pile and play it under a card (for example, having a black 7 card and playing it under a revealed red 6 in the bottom piles). However, that idea made the game too easy–part of the difficulty of Solitaire was only being able to place the cards in descending order on top of each other.

Another idea that we had when going through the playtesting process was to have a mechanic that would include rolling dice. The idea was that if the player managed to roll matching dice, they would be able to “peek” at one of the unrevealed cards. We also threw around the idea of that “peek” not being based on rolling dice, and instead being based on the player having a limited number of “peeks” per game. 

We decided against this idea for two main reasons. The first reason was that implementing the use of dice for a single mechanic would be impractical–part of the reason that solitaire is considered a good game is because it does not require more than a deck of cards and knowledge of the rules. 

The second reason was that the “peek” mechanic would not be very useful, or would only be useful in very niche situations. There is not necessarily a time in which a player needs to know what card comes next in an unrevealed pile, unless two of the same cards have the potential to be played. This is because regardless of what card comes next, the player will need to reveal all unrevealed cards in order to win. Add that reason to the fact that using dice made the mechanic based on luck, and it made for a mechanic that was almost useless.

When I playtested the game, we ran into an issue–the game was slightly too hard. Kings were the first cards removed from play to be placed into the Foundation piles, so it made moving cards around difficult as the blank spaces were essentially put out of commission. To address this issue, we decided to add a rule that players could move Queens or Jacks into blank spaces as well, a rule normally reserved for Kings.

As a team, other than running into and revising many rules that we came up with, there were no issues as far as managing the team or making sure that we did work and turned it in on time. Our group was pretty cohesive and welcome to throw ideas down for playtesting or discussion.

Moving forward, I actually enjoyed this iteration process very much, and plan on trying to do it every time I make a game. Being able to freely brainstorm ideas with other people was crucial because it let us springboard off of those potentially successful or unsuccessful ideas into more succinct ideas that were more formulated. In addition, playtesting early allowed us as a group to figure out not necessarily if the game was fun, but if it worked on a technical level.