WORKSHOP: ZELONDA GAME
DURATION: 3 hours
Completed in July 2022
ABOUT
ZELONDA is a board game for a dear friend’s 30th birthday, designed by me & my close friends in 2019. Game is about the story of Zeynep’s transformation into ZELONDA, based on real events in her life.
SUMMARY
When we designed the game 3 years ago, we didn’t have time to test play the game. We just design with our instincts and our basic knowledge on board games. When we played ZELONDA for the first time, something was not quite right. With the memory of that feeling from 3 years ago, I organized a game night workshop with my friends to define what the problems are and how we can solve them.
ZELONDA
Before we dive into game night workshop, let’s learn how to play the game and what are the rules.
SETTING UP THE GAME
+ Join the board pieces and lay it on a flat surface.
+ Pile the chance and question cards on the table.
+ Pick your Zeynep. Each player gets a different version of Zeynep to move around the board.
+ Give each player 10 coins.
+ Roll the dice to pick the first player. Whoever rolls the highest number goes first.
+ Game continues clockwise around the board.
HOW TO PLAY
+ Roll the dice and move your Zeynep.
+ Look at the space you landed on. Take action according to the space. If this action leads you to another space. You should take action according to the new space. This continues until you can’t land another space.
+ First to finish wins the game.
MEANING OF EACH SPACE IN BOARD
There are 5 different kind of space types:
Chance: This requires you to draw a card from the chance deck. Read the card and follow the instructions.
Question: This requires you to draw a card from the question deck. Read the card. If your answer is acceptable you can stay in your position. If it is not, you have to go back to your previous position.
Location: These spaces refer to the important locations in Zeynep’s life. You don’t take action but with chance cards you can end up in some of these locations.
Event: Events that make Zeynep earn or lose money. Collect or pay coins by type of event.
Empty: These spaces don’t require any action.
There are also hourglass icons. If your chance card says wait, you should use an hourglass while waiting.
GAME NIGHT WORKSHOP
When we played the ZELONDA at Zeynep’s birthday party for the first time, 3 years ago, we realized that something was not quite right. Since all we wanted was to have fun, we didn’t care much about these problems and we had a pleasant evening.
Fast-forward to the present, with that urge in the back of my mind, I organized a game night workshop among my friends. Half of this small group of 8, happened to be architects and engineers, were also the original designers of the game. Everyone was familiar with the design processes in some way due to their profession but I acted as a facilitator.
After playing the first few rounds as a warm-up for remembering the game, we continued to play by discussing its problems. After making a note of the problems we identified without focusing on solutions, we categorized these problems and brainstormed how to deal with them.
PROBLEMS
IMBALANCE OF COINS
+ There’s not enough coins in the bank to give.
+ All players collect a lot of coins.
+ There are too many actions for collecting coins.
+ There is no action for players to spend their collected coins.
MISSING THE MAIN PURPOSE
+ You rarely come across chance cards.
GRAPHICS
+ There is no defined place for putting the cards.
+ There aren’t any identifying marks on question cards
IDEATION & TESTING
From the results of this ideation step, we immediately reflected the ones that could be applied by changing a few rules in the game and continued playing the game. In this way, we have seen how the changes we propose will have an impact. After playing a few more rounds with the new version of the game, we did an evaluation session and made follow-up suggestions.
Alteration:
We have determined new values for the coins to be collected. For example, +7 is now +4.
Impact:
This was still not enough. It may be good to add new cards so that the collected coins are returned to the bank.
Alteration:
In the context of this game, the most fun part of the game is chance cards because they are full of inside jokes. There are very few chance spaces on the board. Alteration was to treat all empty spaces on the board as if they were chance spaces.
Impact:
Without any blank space on the board, the players ended up having too many moves during their turn. In addition to converting less than half of the empty spaces (not all of them), some of the event spaces that cause players to collect coins could be converted to chance spaces.
New Rule:
As a different approach from the above, the endgame rule can be changed so that collecting coins has a purpose. The first person to reach the finish point wins +15 coins. The one with the most coins wins the game.
Impact:
For this rule to work, cards must be added where one player can damage another player’s coins. In its current state, with a few exceptions, coins are collected from the bank or paid to the bank by the player. There is almost no exchange of coins between players.
FINAL THOUGHTS
I once again understand how important it is to test the product with users. From this point the next step could be implementing the new suggestions to the board & the cards. Also changing the layout to meet the needs like being able to pile the cards could be a good addition.
Hi there! 