I combined my love of generative art, microfiction, and board games to design a writing game where the players collaboratively build a situation and then each separately flesh it out into a story. This game was successfully funded on Kickstarter in December 2018, and is now available online. I hoped that this would be a way for people like me who enjoy writing and stories but don’t really make time for it to have a reason to do it in a social setting, as well as a fun board game for people who tend to like creative gaming. I adapted the idea of encoding words and relationships between them from Twitter bots into a set of cards with words and the relationships between them. These function similarly to dominoes to build a board containing the situation described by a story. Players then each write their interpretation of that story, share them with one another, and vote on a winner.
This project involved lots of iteration using UX design methodologies to determine what words and kinds of words work well and build a balanced deck that is fun and replayable without being too large and unwieldy. I also had to create a visual language that would make teaching the game as easy as possible, differentiate the cards, and make reading the board easy given that cards are placed facing all different directions.
