Sportsball

Around The World

For the Global Game Jam in 2016, my wife Diane Pizzuto and I participated as a team and decided to make a board or card game together. She is a professional Graphic Designer, and while an analog game doesn’t require and coding, I was excited to spend more time as a game designer than just implementing other people’s ideas. The theme of the jam was “Strange Rituals”, and most teams at our site went with voodoo themed games or “daily rituals”. We decided to approach the jam’s theme with from the angle of the superstitious that sports fans follow in order to help their team win (even though they have no effect whatsoever).

DE-FENSE

The game is relatively simple. Players are split into two teams, with each individual trying to build sets of merchandise that give their team an edge over the other side. There are several different types of apparel, modifiers to that apparel (like “signed” or “never washed”), and other various types of merchandise. In each round, there are 3 rules that give extra (or negative) points to the teams. Only one rule is publicly known - each team only knows one of the other two. So the teams must guess from the other team’s play what their rule might be. It was an interesting idea, but unfortunately the gameplay was rather slow, and tallying points with the extra rules was a bit tedious. Either way, it was still a fun experience for just a weekend.