Peer assessment of board game and evauation of own game, test audience research

The outline of the brief was to create a new board game that had traditional elements such as playing pieces, have a clear product identity and must have a clear target audience. I believe the creators of 'Question M' did stick to the brief however  in some places, the game is slightly vague. Take for example the colour scheme; the creators used red and orange as their main colour scheme which would be fine if it wasnt for the fact that the tone of colours used clashed massively, muted tones were used (wether this was a printing fault or done on purpose i am unsure) however this made the board very difficult to read and, being brutally honest, ascetically unpleasant to look at, if i was to improve the game i would make the choice to use a different colour theme that could be clearly read. The board uses traditional elements, as the brief asks for, in the way that visually it looks similar to a board with set squares like snakes and ladders or Monopoly, playing pieces to play and question cards to get around the board but thats it. In my opinion the game seems repetitive but i thought there was a light at the end of the tunnel in that the creators had added random white squares across their board which i believed would add an some individuality to their game, however i was incorrect. There was no reason for the white boxes which was very misleading to both me as a reviewer and i assume an audience playing the game.

Question M uses playing cards based on questions created surrounding our media course as well as knowledge on famous films such as directors and release dates, this creates its target audience for the game (us) however if the team were to consider this product a game to sell their market would be very limited.  Adding these cards also gave the game an identity which makes the game more understandable in terms of the ascetic with its playing pieces such as magnifying glasses. After seeing the prototype of the game i can see where the creators were aiming to get however more effort could have been applied to the prototype such as sticking cut out pieces of paper onto cardboard to not look so amateurish, i believe that a dice should have also been added to the game to add entertainment value.

In conclusion, i believe that 'Question M' meets the critria of the brief however needs some adjustments doing to it to ensure the game is usable, such as colour adjustments. I believe the team also need to re think how they can make the game more entertaining as currently its very repetitive and predictable.

Evaluation

For the task of creating our own board game each individual member was given a separate task to do, for example; Chanel was in control of creating the board in which the game was played on, Emanuela was in charge of creating the logo as well as overall board game design and Amy and I were in charge of the detailing of the game such as the playing cards, playing pieces, rules and creation of the prototype. As a group i believe we worked well and productively to create the prototype of a game to be proud. The prototype was created out of cardboard, printing off the appropriate size for the board game which fitted with the brief measurements of A3, on reflection the size of the playing board was too small for the size of our created box however when creating the board we thought best to arr on the size of caution to avoid later issues. We also found this with the playing pieces, discovering that they were too small for the board itself and did not sit in proportion with the rest of playing cards, to fix this next time I would enlarge the board itself and then the rest of the pieces to fit with the size of the A3 board game to be more accurate. When looking at other prototypes created, most of them were much larger than our board game, big enough to properly play the game, however our box was a decent size and fitted in with the brief we were given.

Test audience research

After completing our board game we set out to create a questionnaire on google forms asking questions related to our game and others opinions on it. This allowed a more detailed point for improvement to be given. For example;

Here are some responses we received;