Challenge Exercise: Exponential Chaos

written by: Shane Emmons

My wife and I play a lot of board games. After getting beat, time and time again, I decided it was time to find some games where we could work together. After experimenting with a few, we quickly found our two favorites: Pandemic and Forbidden Island. But now that we've played them so much, we're looking for more. That's where you come in.

During this assignment, you are going to create your own cooperative board game using similar mechanics to those in Pandemic and Forbidden Island. You should attempt to model the game and let a single player play a few turns via the console. You don't need fancy graphics or visual design.

Examples of chaotic cooperative games with exponential elements

Below are some links to videos and/or rules for several games that you can draw inspiration from.

Pandemic:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5JxMh1FP4b0
• http://www.zmangames.com/boardgames/pandemic.htm
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vaJhiht8NA&feature=fvst

Forbidden Island:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYVOTPsWeN4

Ghost Stories:

• http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/37046/ghost-stories

Red November:

• http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36946/red-november

Exercise Summary

• Design and model a game with the following features:
  • A map which can be represented as a graph structure
  • Rules that result in exponentially increasing danger as the game progresses
  • Resources which players must collect repeatedly in sets to win the game
  • Rules that create tension between slowing down immediate danger and collecting all the needed resources
• Create your own unique theme, don't copy the scenarios from the example games
• Implement at least a single player mode which demonstrates the game setup and the different actions that can take place on a turn.

Submission Guidelines

If you plan to work on this exercise, you should fork this repository and push code early and often during the course. The course guidelines PDF explains the submission process in detail, but please contact an instructor if you have any questions.