My Remote!
A board game that turns grown adults into bickering siblings, fighting to gain control over the TV remote. Voted “Favorite Game” at PIGDA Board Game Jam 2018.
ROLE: Game Designer,
TEAM: 3
DURATION: 8 hours
CLIENT: PIGDA Board Game Jam
THEME: Freedom
PROCESS:
Find the fantasy
Develop Mechanics
Prototype
Iterate
We started by brainstorming the fantasy that we wanted to fulfill and ended up going for the “TV Channel switching” idea.
Moving further along we created DESIGN PILLARS based on the fantasy:
Nostalgic Fantasy
Large number of choices
Exaggeration
Based on these pillars we started developing mechanics and prototyping them.
Developing mechanics
The final setup – Time slots, 5 channel cards and TV show card decks
FINAL DESIGN
After two failed prototypes, we decided to revisit our core design pillar- Nostalgic Fantasy of fighting over the TV remote and this is what we ended up with.
RULES:
The players repeatedly roll dice to get a 10 or higher, at which point they can snatch the remote. With the remote in hand, they have to pick a card from one of the decks in front of them. Each deck is a “channel” with a name, and the cards comprising it are TV shows. They must read out the channel name and TV show (which are increasingly long and ridiculous) and place it on a 30 minute time slot to lock in the TV for that time, and get 1 point. However, as they are reading it, another player might roll a 10 or higher and snatch the remote from them. The round ends when players fill the time slots from 6 pm to 12 am – “Mom’s home!” ends the round.
The time slot board has tracks, one for each player, so that the players have a visual sense of how many cards are in their track i.e how many points they each have. We playtested this mechanic – it felt good, so we decided to flesh it out a bit more. We added in combo bonuses and 3 rounds for a more complete experience.
