Survival

Survival is a strategic board game where the goal is for a player to eliminate all the other players and retrieve all the keys to unlock their home. Players have various characters at their disposal who have different traits and movement speeds across the board. Each player has a key, which they can choose to give to any character, and they must protect their key as well as gather all the other player's keys if they wish to win.

This project was done by four students as a part of Game Design for UX in Symbiosis Institute of Design, Pune, India.

The first step to initiating any project is to research the topic thoroughly. Our group looked up various possibilities and game types to understand how board games came into existence and how they are still an important part of our culture. Our mutual interest lied in making a strategic game for an age group which rarely plays table-top games.

When the basic framework was thought of, our next step was to create personas which fit our targeted age group which was 16-24 years. Four people being in the group, we all made personas of different ages with different backgrounds and explored how these four would come together and play our board game. When thinking of such, we framed a story around it which let us finalise our theme for the game as well as its essence, which would be 'survival.'

When our basic idea was finalised, our next step was to create a rough layout of the board and the characters. We used minimum effort and resources to craft out our idea so that we could test it as soon as possible and understand the errors in our approach as well as the design.

When our prototype was ready, we asked our classmates to test it out, which resulted in us realising some gameplay balancing flaws and design technicalities. We took notes of the same and improved our final design to reflect it.

Each player has 4 different characters and they all have different functions they can perform on the board.

△ : Can move only diagonally, maximum 2 steps, can kill ‘Boss’ and ‘⧠’, can be killed by ‘Boss’ and ‘○’

⧠ : Can change direction mid way, maximum 3 steps, can kill ‘Boss’ and ‘○’, can be killed by ‘Boss’ and ‘△’

○ : Can change direction mid way, maximum 3 steps, can kill ‘Boss’ and ‘△’, can be killed by ‘Boss’ and ‘⧠’

Boss: Can move only in one direction (unidirection), move 4 steps, can kill everyone and be killed be only the Boss.

The game starts from the center of the board, where all the characters are placed together, and ends when one player reaches their ‘home’ on the opposite side of where they start from. Each player will be given a ‘key’ and they can decide on which character holds the key. The key each player decides on to give to their character will be unknown to other players.

The objective of the game is to collect all 4 keys and a player to reach their home. This will make only one player the complete winner. A player can continue to play with their other characters even if their key has been procured by other player, as a final chance to reclaim their own or other’s keys before being completely eliminated.

The keys which each player decides will have to be written at the start of the game in chits and kept in a chit box, which shall eliminate possibility of cheating or bluffing the actual location of the chits.