This is Part Two of the series on redesigning a game for a new theme and topic. To read Part One, go here!
With any game design (or redesign) process, knowing the objective of the game is critical. What does a “win” look like? What must a player do well to succeed in your game world, and how must they demonstrate that they did it the best?
As mentioned in Part One, I realized that Dead of Winter had a great overall objective structure for players: help the group achieve the main goal, all while secretly working toward your own, secret goal. During some binge watching of The West Wing and Veep, I knew I had to reskin and remix this game for the world of politics.
So we’ve identified our game and new theme. What now? I like to have an overall planning document where I begin to lay out how I translate elements of the game into the new theme, and also how I will modify the mechanics to work with my own learning or play-based vision. For this particular game, I began charting the elements of Dead of Winter and how they might look as elements in the political world.
In order to achieve the overall win condition, players must survive a number of crisis cards that demand they play resources. In addition, they must protect each other from zombie storming the gates of their stronghold, along with encountering them out at various locations where more resources can be found.
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| Example of a Crisis Card from Dead of Winter. |
So, let’s see what would qualify as a “crisis” in the political world, and what would be considered a “resource” of a politician. Resources are finite and come up a number of times, so establishing those is the most important part. Dead of Winter establishes five major resources in a zombie apocalypse: food, medicine, tools, weapons, and fuel. To be honest, these resources are only thematic in nature - their mechanics are unchanged in the game. To that end, I don’t need to make the politics-themed resources align with its Dead of Winter counterpart. Instead, I just came up with five “resources” for a politician: cash, political capital, votes, interest groups, and committee roles.
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| Some of the resources in Dead of Winter reskinned for our game! |
Now that we’ve reskinned the resources, let’s talk about these “crises” that come up in Dead of Winter. Again, the Crisis cards themselves are mainly thematic, such as a food shortage that needs more food cards played, or a cold spell that requires fuel cards. For the political game, Crisis Cards, I envision Crisis cards such as Budget Deficit that requires Committee Role cards to be played, or a Campaign Finance Reform Crisis that requires more Cash cards to be used. The thematic-only reskin is easy because you, as the creator, are the content master of those scenarios. I can think of hundreds of political crises, and then I decide the most relevant political “resource” needed to tackle them.
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| A location in Dead of Winter. |
Another mechanic of Dead of Winter is six locations around the board that players can explore to gather more resources. For the political redesign, I have decided to turn these into “actions” a politician might take instead. I have also decided to cut it down to five for the same of symmetry with the resources, as well as simplifying the game a bit more. The five actions will be: Fundraising Event, Legislation, Campaign, Caucus, and International Trip. As you might notice from the Location card in Dead of Winter, resources have varying levels of prevalence at each location, so I must align the action to the resources accordingly. Below is how frequently each resource might appear at each political activity:
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| Reskin of the locations in Dead of Winter. |
Great! We’ve got a vision for our game resources, locations for gaining these resources, and some potential “crisis” cards to overcome in our new game. Progress!
In the next blog, we start to get into the real fun - designing some of the specific cards for the objectives, crises, players, and the “zombie” stand-ins. Should be fun!
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