Minion Melee: Finished product

My Board Game Minion Melee is finally completed!!! Here are the shots of the finished product. 

Minion Melee, Print and Play: Refinish (Update 11-17-13)

I AGAIN revised a bit of my print and play. Reduced both the page count and size drastically, and improved both the art and the rules a bit. Here's the newer version.

Minion Melee!

And here is some art for my minion cards: 

Minion Melee: Finished Print and Play

Here's the link to my  finished Print and Play called "Minion Melee". It's been a lot of work, but it's really satisfying to see it at this stage of completion.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxzwtcRe6fTrNEJESFdRMlYzZzQ/edit?usp=drive_web

Storytelling Illustration: Second Step Sketches

I narrowed my 20 thumbnails down to 5 ideas and refined these ideas a bit more.

  I decided that each color of minion in my game would be a sort of "suit" and have its own theme. So the black minions are sort of hellion, ghostly types, the blue are robotic types, the purple are alien, the yellow are toxic waste mutations, and the green are "monster" or beastly types. All of the types of minions are represented in the sketch below.

These last 3 feature ideas I came up with for the characters that players could choose from in the game, and each villain ties into one of the 5 minion classes. 

Thumbnails for Concept Painting and Solutions

We're currently in the very early stages of creating an illustration that tells the story of our game. Here are some thumbnails I did based off of my game's concept. I was mostly focused on composition as opposed to specific stylistic elements as I'm still deciding what the minions should look like. 

As for rule changes I fixed a few of the unresolved issues I mentioned in my last post by adding a mechanic called "war phases". Here's how I have these phases currently described in my game's rules:

War Phase Triggers:

In the game there are three war phases. The first war phase is triggered when a player adds their 8th minion to their army. The second is triggered when the 16th minion is added. The final war phase occurs after the minion cards in the face down draw pile runs out and each player has taken their final turn.

How War Works:

In the first two war phases the player who triggered the war phase by adding the 8th or 16th minion is awarded a 2 point bonus. There is no award for triggering war in the final war phase. The player with the highest score when a war phase is triggered automatically wins the round, and receives a bonus of 4 points. Second place earns a bonus of 2 points. Third place must remove one of the minions from their army and reduce their point count based on the value of that minion. Fourth place must remove TWO of their minions and reduce their point count based on the value of both of those minions.

Play Test Results and A New Direction

A lot of changes have occurred with my game since my last blog post. Firstly, I decided to make a minor adjustment to my game's concept or theme. I've decided that instead of mad scientists building an army of robots my theme will be super villains building an army of minions. It is not a huge shift, and there are some similarities between the two concepts but it was a change I felt worth noting. Secondly, I've had a few chances to play test my game and have been tweaking and changing any problems that have arisen from those trial runs.

"You mad, bro?"

First Round of Play Testing 

In this initial round my idea was to simply get the items I needed to play test and go from there. I ended up over printing a lot and came out with many more cards than I needed, which I believe caused the most problems.

Main Issues: 

• Too many minion and money cards made the draw piles over saturated in terms of specific colors coming up much too frequently, and some not coming up frequently at all.
• This problem also made the game very monotonous.
• There weren't enough minion cards on the table, so it made it hard to actually buy minion cards which is an important mechanic in the game. 
• Players didn't feel like they were really accomplishing or doing much in the game. 
• The game's play time dragged on for way too long. 
• Having only a single action per turn was another factor that made the game run too long and feel slow to players.

Fixes: 

• I cut down the number of both minion and money cards significantly. 
• I upped the number of minion cards on the table from 5 to 7. 
• I upped the number of actions a player could take per turn from one to two. 

Mad Strats.

Second Round of Play Testing

For the second round I cut down the amount of cards drastically. This significantly improved game play, but there were still problems that arose during this round of testing. The game went faster though still not fast enough and the entire process felt more fun and strategic. I also got a lot of good ideas from the Juniors I play tested the game with in terms of aesthetics.

Main Issues: 

• The Power Markers were determined to be redundant and more of an annoyance than a necessity.
• The fight mechanic felt like it could be too easily taken advantage of. 
• There are too many money colors on the board, which is another reason the game goes so long and hand size is a problem. They should be cut down to 4 as opposed to 7. 
• The point system is too confusing, the points should just correlate to the actual cards being played rather than scale up. 

Fixes:

• I've decided to cut the power markers entirely out of the game. 
• I have decided to cut down the money colors to 4 as opposed to 7.
• I've simplified the point system to be more straight forward.

Issues I'm still working on resolving: 

• A Problem with hand limit came up in both play testing sessions. It was too easy to hoard money cards, and it got complicated to have essentially two separate hands between money and minion cards. I'm not sure how to resolve this yet, I am considering mandatory discards. 
• The fight system is currently not quite working properly. Someone suggested instead of having the fights occur while the minions are in a player's hand, eliminate the hand step all together and just have them be instantly played in the player's army, and then having the armies actually fight. 
• There is currently not enough player to player interaction within the game. Fixing the fight mechanic would likely resolve this issue. 
• Because the "power markers" were deemed redundant, my method for ending the game has essentially been removed. I'd still like to keep the goal to be achieving the most points by the end of the game, but I need to figure out another way to end the game without the markers.

First draft Rules

Army of Minions

Only the most maniacal will conquer!

Sarah Lynn Reynolds

20 minutes, 2-4 Players

Goal: To Score the most points by the end of the game

You are an evil super villain trying to build your army of minions in order to conquer the world. But other super villains have heard the news and are building armies of their own. Who will conquer their peers and ultimately the world?

Game Components

-Board for drawing cards

-Board for Keeping score

-Minion Cards

-Power Markers

-Money cards

-Player score markers

-Printing Instructions

Setting up the game

The player with the most recent death of a pet goes first.

Each player starts with 4 “money” cards and all of their own colored score markers.

Money Cards are shuffled and 5 are drawn from the top of the deck and placed face up in the bank. The remaining money cards stay face down in the deck next to the face up cards. When a player draws from the 5 face up cards, they must fill the spot of the card they took with cards from the top of the face down draw pile.

Minion cards are set up in the same way in their own “bank”.

Players place their score markers on number 1 of the score board.

Turn Order

Players can take one action every turn

Action 1: Drawing Money Cards

You may draw 2 cards per turn either from the face up pile or the random pile. Or one from each.

Action 2: Fight!

A player may instigate a fight as their turn action. Both the challenger and the challenged player choose randomly from each others hand to pick who fights who. (Have players shuffle their hand before doing this so that people can’t just choose the last card they pulled) The minion with the highest value wins. The winning minion is placed face up in the player’s army, while the losing minion must be discarded. Cards already in a player’s army face up on the table may not be challenged. Only cards in player’s hand can be challenged.

Action 3: Buy A Minion

Each minion card has a value between 1 and 6 and a color of either red, green, blue, violet, black, grey, orange. Players can purchase a minion when the have the corresponding color and amount of cards indicated on a particular minion card. They may only purchase minions that are face up on the table. When a minion is purchased a card from the top of the draw pile replaces it.

Action 4: Add a Minion to your army

Minions are not officially in a players army until they are played face up on the table. Thus, at the end of the game minions in your hand are not added up for point value. Only the minions on the table are added to a player’s score. For this action a player simply places one of their minion cards on the table in front of them to add to their army. When they add a minion card to their army they compare the card’s value to the point scale and move their score marker the number of points indicated on the scale.

Check for Victory

-The game ends when a player has two or less power markers left.

-Each player takes a final turn, ending on the person who ended the game.

-Player with the most fight wins gets a 10 point bonus

-Player with the most minions gets a 10 point bonus

-Scores are counted

-Player with the most overall points wins the game.

End of turn

-Replace minion and money cards if drawn

-Move score marker if points were scored during turn

-Make sure everyone has enough power markers left to continue the game

-Play passes to the left