ED

During this week's Play and Games tutorial, we were tasked with researching and play-testing Ludo. From there, we had an hour to come up with our own variation of the game. Although our game board is rather basic in the pictures, it was functional and quick to make.

Rules

Every player has four counters in their section and the board looks like the pictures below, just as in classic Ludo. Excuse the crudeness of it, this was just an experiment!

As well as the counters, players are also given 6 tokens each (labelled A-F), which all mean something different:

A - Grants immunity to all the player's counters on the board so no tokens can be used against them.

B - The player has the ability to move double the dice roll.

C - Allows another token to be taken from the section so it can now be moved around the game board with any others.

D - Once another player has taken a turn, the player who chose this token may choose to move that player in the reverse direction. If the targetted player also has picked D as their token, they can reverse this effect and the counter can remain where it is.

E - The player can swap the places of ANY 2 counters so long as they are within 5 spaces of eachother.

F - The effect of this token depends on how many players chose it for that round.

1 - nothing happens

2 - those two players move any of their counters 13 spaces

3 - the player who did not choose this token must now lose a counter back to their starting section

4 - every player loses a counter.

Game Loop

Unlike in Ludo, the player does not have to roll a six on the dice to take a counter out of their section. Instead every player can use a counter on their first turn. We chose to remove the 'six' rule as it caused frustration if one player was lucky enough to roll multiple sixes and stride ahead of others who may not have even put one counter on the board. With our variation of Ludo we wanted to make it more skill/prediction based rather than relying on the roll of the dice.

A round begins with each player choosing a token and all revealing at the same time. Once a token has been chosen it cannot be reused in the following rounds until all other tokens have been used. One of the players then begins by rolling their dice and moving 'x' spaces depending on what they rolled. Now the other players may choose to use a token on them if they wish, and if not then the turn goes to the next player. When all players have taken a turn, they rechoose tokens then the person who went last in the previous round goes first. The win conditions of the original Ludo remain the same in this version.

Summary

We had time to play and tweak this game for around an hour. In that time we were happy with the outcome and this game plays well. This was a good exercise to begin preparing us for making our own board games this semester.