Pipopoly (2019)

Pipopoly is a board game, created for the purpose of a board game course at Future Games. We were three game designers on this team.

The vision for this game was something of a parody. One of the more relaxed projects I've done, this was done purely for fun and to flex our design muscles rather than consider a market in particular. As such, you can also see some parody elements in the gameplay and look of it.

In this game, up to four players compete for space to build the longest, most impressive mining pipeline this deserted planet has ever seen. This has to do with our randomised theme prompt, which was the Transatlantic Pipeline on the American coast.

My Roles

Concept Designer
Narrative Designer
General Developer
Tester

My Responsibilities

Part of concept and worldbuilding.
Worked with team to create a physical prototype to test.
Updated this prototype as needed during the process.
Part of regular playtesting to ensure quality gameplay.

This was a fairly relaxed project without much need for management. We made decisions together and designed a game that we would enjoy telling other people about. The vision was simple: a strategy game with humorous elements. The kind a family can play on a game night.

Process

This project was very good practice for making a physical prototype of a concept. Though we took a quite silly route with the subject matter (one may notice some parody aspects of Monopoly, as this was not to be sold), the implementation was discussed and iterated on a lot with continuous playtesting to ensure that the gameplay still made sense and improved. There were several challenges with this game, including the odd theme and the limitation that gameplay had to take about twenty minutes total (hence the “exploding planet” time limit) and so we had to adapt a lot as a team.

An impasse. Either player can solve this by paying to remove and rebuild the end of their pipeline in another direction. — An impasse, but not the end of the game. Either player can fix this by paying to remove and rebuild the end of their pipeline.

We adjusted this game continuously for the two weeks we were given for it, and I learned a lot about prioritising when it comes to physical prototyping. One should be economic with paper, after all.

Since we were three designers and no artists with a tight deadline for this, the course did not call for custom art for this project. As such, it remains a simple prototype with placeholders.