playcentric

Game Design #1!

The theme of this game is constellations, and the premise is simple – match groupings of stars. Ironically, it’s probably better suited to be a board game than a computer game.

The board is made up of a series of tiles layed out face-up in a grid (something like 15 x 15 might work best). There are only two types of tiles – blank sky and starts. So as you can imagine, the board looks something like a starry night sky, and ideally the board is like one of those nifty Scrabble boards that can rotate around so each player can view the board from any angle.

Each player is dealt from a deck of constellation cards. On each constellation card is a particular lay-out of stars. Constellation cards could range from two-star arrangements up to more complicated constellations that have 10 stars. Constellation cards only designate the arrangement that the stars have to be in – the grid spots in between on the board could be either stars or blank sky.

Players go in turn, and each player’s goal during a turn is to match one of their constellation cards to a corresponding layout of stars on the board. When a player makes a match they get to take all of those stars off the board, and then replace the tiles with new ones from the pile of extras (these should be chosen and layed out randomly). The player can then draw another constellation card for their hand. If a player can’t make a match they can replace one tile with a randomly-chosen extra tile.

The first player to get 50 stars wins!

I would love to actually playtest this game at some point, and I mostly just made up the numbers above so I would be interested to see how it actually plays out. I’m not a programmer so I’m always excited when I can think up games that I can actually playtest without writing any code.