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Meteorite Mania

A tabletop board game about globetrotting and meteorite hunting

Click here to play the game on Tabletop Simulator
Click here to view design documentation

Team and My Responsibilities

Meteorite Mania was created by myself and another student. I co-designed the game including the theming, rules, and expected flow of play. I was solely responsible for conducting the playtesting and design iteration, as well as compiling the art assets into the tabletop environment.

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Game Description
Meteorite Mania is a 3 to 4 player tabletop game that was created in Tabletop Simulator. Players act as globetrotting meteorite hunters who  traverse the board in order to collect meteorites as fast as possible. At any point, players make the decision to either donate or sell their collected meteorites. While the game is won using donation points, selling a meteorite allows players to purchase equipment which can give them an advantage against their competitors. The game ends once a single player has collected 5 meteorites, and the winner is the player who holds the highest donation score.

Challenge

This was my first time developing a board game rather than a video game. Incorporating complex rules was simple to implement. However, the lack of an easy way to handle things such as setup and card management, which would have been simple tasks for a video game, became major hurdles in development. I needed to shift my mindset to design the game for easy manual tracking instead of relying on an automated process. For instance, we designed and implemented a number of assets, such as tokens and separate boards, intended to reduce cognitive load.

Development Environment / Tools Used

Meteorite Maia was created in Tabletop Simulator. My partner and I used Google suite in order to communicate ideas and brainstorm the design.


Highlight

Most games I have developed have been playtested with a single feature in mind and have been lightly documented. With this game I had the goal to rigorously obtain and document group feedback across all aspects of the game in each session. Due to the ability to easily make extensive changes anywhere in the game design, I was able to rapidly iterate the design while obtaining immediate feedback. Additionally, I was able to carefully record the evolution of the design, documenting the reason and motivation behind each change.

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