Update to the game

For the character, it's a choose your own adventure concept. We, as the creators, are going to find out all the possible final outcomes that go with choices. We are also going to have a karma scale so if you do something terrible, terrible things are to come.

Risk (11/29/12- Lily)

Take 2:
     As our Risk board was cleared off since we last played and we didn't take any pictures of it, we had to start over. Jasmine was absent, so I played for her, managing to get the entirety of South America and Africa for her (then having her squander it by putting all her little soldierpeople in Madagascar, but never mind about that). However, we didn't save the board again, so on to take 3.

Take 3:
   We've realized that Risk kinda takes forever to play, so you really have to go out of your way to find time to play it right, which can be inconvenient (hence our inability to finish a game even after this long of a time). Our game will probably be similarly time-consuming so people can play it seriously (bit of an oxymoron, serious gameplay...) and really get into the strategy of it, because most of the board games I know of that can be played quickly are simple mindless games, and we don't want to make one of those.
    I almost have all of Asia! I put every one of my units in either Australia or Asia to start because I didn't want to be spread too thin around the world, and it's much easier to defend just one big connected corner of land than it is for even two areas. I did jump into attacking a bit too quickly and lost the Middle East to Nate's attack from Ukraine (which is also home to Victoria's time-sharing cavalry) because of my improperly defended border, but either way, it will be rectified soon enough. All of us have a certain focus area; Jasmine has settled herself into the Americas, Nate is based in Europe, and Andy is limited to Africa after I drove him out of Asia. It is a bit like 1984's superstates, except that each of us would really like to end the war by winning as quickly as possible instead of dragging it out.
     So far, the only real alliance we've had is mine and Jasmine's. We haven't had any coordinated attacks yet, but we share a border at the Bering Strait (or did, at least, before Nate invaded Alaska) and basically just don't attack each other, targeting Nate instead, viewing him as more of a threat, as he has more Risk experience than any of us. Andy barely has any units left and isn't a very useful alliance prospect, so Nate is on his own attacking us, though he's been almost holding his own.
     It does not seem likely we will return to Risk, as we our class time is limited after multiple absences by one group member or another and would like to move on to other games from which we can learn about different aspects of gameplay-- though I think it's really just because the others do not wish to face their imminent eradication from the face of the Risk board.

Monopoly

Nate will bring Monopoly on Monday because we need another competitive game. Monopoly is very popular and people will be able to understand what we are doing.

Ideas Part 1

New ideas for the board game:
1. We decided to make it into a competitive game rather than a teamwork one because honestly competitive is more exciting and people enjoy it more.
2. The board will possibly be a sphere because Lily likes shapes.
3. The 4 players will be 4 different amnesia patients and the object of the game is to be the first to recover your memory.
4. Each player knows information about another player , but you don't know who the information is for.
5. In some way, you can't see where the other players are on the board.

Risk 11/29/12

We are exploring more mechanics of this game Risk and it is taking forever to set up! The concept of being able to choose wherever you want to put things is very clever and we want to incorporate that into our game.

Bad strategies of the day: 2 days ago, Jasmine was a fool and put every single one of her units in Madagascar! Although, she ended up winning... Jasmine was never here that day and we made her units do that.

Sidenote: I just lost all of my units in China to Lily! What is this! :( Lily just wiped all my pieces off of Asia and I'm sad.

I am so close to gettting Africa! 

To be continued...

Notes on Game Play Mechanisms: Focused Goal

In most games, there is always a clear end goal that all of the players of working towards. In Risk, the goal is to wipe the rest of the teams off the map through ruthless strategy and in Pandemic, the goal is to save the world by eradicating all four diseases. Our goal is to create a board game that strenghthens and puzzles the mind by breaking all the barriers set by the average board game, and so we want our game to be open-ended so that each player can decide the direction they want the game to take. 

  

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Staff of The Geopsych Ward would like to wish all of you a very happy turkey day!

Survey questions

Questions

1) Are you in a school sport or a club currently?

2) Do you plan on being in a school-offered extracurricular?

3) Did you have somebody to guide you through being a freshmen at the beginning of the school year?

4) Would you have benefited from having an upperclassman be a mentor to you? Explain.






5) Would you feel more comfortable getting help from a fellow student or from an adult?

Semester Project

For our second quarter and semester grade, our teachers gave us the assignment of examining our school, Palatine High School, and finding an environmental or logistical problem to identify and solve. We brainstormed a lot and Jasmine came through with a great idea that got approved by Mrs. Sheehan. The idea is somewhat of a buddy system for freshmen. The transition from middle school to high school is definitely crazy hard so we wanted to have seniors and juniors be paired with a freshmen to help them. Having peers who have experienced hardship as a freshmen help them seems much easier for the incoming ones than having an adult try and help. Students listen easier to people that they can relate to. I myself(Andy) was fortunate enough to have my cross country older friends tell me about the good and bad of high school. I feel like everyone should have this opportunity. We first need to survey the freshmen to see if they would have found it easier to survive with a buddy. Then, we need to contact the school board to see if something like this has existed before. For now, we are creating a survey to give the kids to see if they would like it.

Group Brainstorm Session

-Freshmen buddies/mentors to assist with the transition into highschool for students not already involved in an athletic or academic activity before the start of the school year. Incoming Freshmen who apply for the program can be paired up with a Junior/Senior who is either on Honor Roll or has been reccomended by teachers -To allow more space in the student parking lot, Students who carpool regularly will recieve a discount on their parking permit

The Solution- Secondary Project for Quarter Two

We have been assigned the project of using Critical Thinking skills to solve a logistical or environmental problem in the skill. Posts about this project and group discussions about it will be filed under "The Solution" ~Nate

Risk: Day 2

     Andy attacks Japan (and fails), then takes Quebec. He discovers that Alaska is vulnerable to attack from Kamchatka, so perhaps his territory choices weren't as good as he thought.
     Jasmine attacks Congo, but does not take it.
     It's Nate's turn again, and he gets busy attacking Andy's holdings, much to the latter's dismay, taking India to further secure Asia.
 
Reflection: so I, Andy had this idea that for turns in our game, we can have turns that last for as long as we want but at the risk of killing the person even more!

 Alliances: Andy and Nate were going to ally against me (Lily) in Siam, but Andy balked after losing a couple soldiers, so it kinda fell apart. I currently have a truce with Jasmine in Africa and South America-- she attacks Andy instead of me, while I let her eradicate him in peace. Anyways, I'm thinking that having the opportunity for alliances and betrayals would be a good way to explore the group dynamics and psychology/sociology side of a board game.

Roundness: The earth is round, but Risk in on a flat board, leading Andy to believe that Alaska was a good choice for him to take (it wasn't particularly). If the game we make involves the earth at a global scale, like Risk, perhaps a spherical playing surface would actually be useful in preventing such confusion.

Risk

1.We are playing Risk right now which me, Jasmine, and Lily have never played. We are starting by putting our foot-soldiers on each country to "conquer them".
2. We get to decide when our turn is over. We roll dice based on which countries we want to attack and the attacker rolls 1-3, the defender rolls 1-2. If the defender rolls a higher #, the attacker loses soldiers based on how many dice were lower than the defenders. If the attacker wins, the defender loses soldiers.
3. It's called risk because if you roll all three dice and get beaten you lose 3 things



The day is over but more will be posted throughout the week.

Group Discussion Log

--Focus research on playing and analyzing board games.-- Hexagon Spaces on Sphere board to allow more movement?-- Strategy game for sure-- Tommorow Nate will bring Risk for us to play and analyze-- Jasmine plans to drop this class, so her group role will be minimized-- Will we make the board a sphere?--

Group Discussion Points

- We want to make a sphererical board to incorporate Lily's topic
- We need to see how much of each aspect of memory or trauma we need to put into the game.
- We need to see some popular strategy and memory games like risk
-We will play Risk tomorrow in class for some background knowledge
- We need to go out and find some confusing games that can help us further understand how our boardgame will look
-We need to research a lot so our basis can be more clearly defined
- Searching some popular challenging board games is what we need to do if we can't find a time to go play some

Fellow Inventors

   A look at some of our more-successful fellow board game designers.
  -A Journey Through Europe (1759), invented by John Jefferys, is the earliest board game with a known inventor.
  -Monopoly as we know it was not invented by any one person, though Charles Darrow (who is, coincidentally, the first board game designer to be a millionaire) is often credited with its conception. The earliest known version of Monopoly, called The Landlord's Game, was made by Elizabeth Magie in 1903.
  - Scrabble, another popular board game, was invented by an architect with an unfortunate surname, Alfred Mosher Butts. Not how he got his 10,000 hours in, unless architecture and board game design has some secret link that I'm missing.
  -Mathematicians can invent games too! John Forbes Nash Jr. studied differential geometry (I think it's Euclidean though, more's the pity) and game theory, among other topics. He was one of the inventors of the board game Hex. He is quite an fascinating character in and of himself-- there's got Hollywood movie (A Beautiful Mind) about him and his schizophrenia, if anybody's interested.
  -If your name is Steve Jackson, you may want to try game design as a line of work. Two Steve Jacksons have already been successful doing so. There's the American Steve Jackson, who founded a Steve Jackson Games, the headquarters of which were raided by the U.S. Secret Service in 1990. There's also the British one, who focuses on video games. I wonder if they're related...

Plans pt 2 :3

We as a group sort of planned the kind of game we wanted to create. We decided to focus more on Andy's topic of memory rather then Nate's topic of trauma. Before we can decide on a theme of a game or anything for it really, we as a group need to take a trip to Woodfield mall ASAP. We need to test all the games we possibly can to find the things we like and dislike about a game. If we do this, we can then begin to create the game dynamics we wish to achieve.

Andy's Lament (In song form)

Why won't people view my blog?/ It makes me oh so sad/ And when people won't view my blog/ It gets me very, mad./ My name is Andrew Tiger Cai/ I come from near Beijjing/ And when I start to type a post/ The angels start to sing/ I've dealt with haters, friends and foes/ But I simply cannot stand/ When my meaningful, beautiful, wonderful posts/ Are ignored throughout the land/ So click on my blog/ I'm the asian nugget dude/ Cuz I'm tired of this garbage/ And I'm tired of yo 'tude ~Andy

Plans

We, as a group, need to find a time to go to a store and see some modern day amazing board games that have been doing very well that also relate to our future game. This will help us bond as a team and hopefully inspire out creativity juices for the game.

Board Game Fun Facts

As our final project will be to design some sort of board game, I thought it would be good to do a little research on them. -The world's oldest board game dates back to 2500 BC (Or BCE depending on your preference) and was discovered in the royal tombs of Iraq in 1927 -More than 250 Million copies of Monopoly have been sold since the game's creation in 1903. -In 1936, a propaganda board game named "Juden Raus" (Or, "Jews Out!" in English) was sold by the nazi party. -A Flash game version of "Pandemic" was released with a twist- instead of stopping the outbreak, your goal is to continue it and wipeout humanity. It gained popularity and was followed by a sequel, "Pandemic 2"

Blog Updates

Updated the theme and will hopefully be adding some widgets soon. ~Nate

Our Project

Since that "problems post", we have made a breakthrough in the idea of our booard game. After thoroughly brainstorming stupid game ideas like abusing children games and other morbid things, we found something amazing. We are going to create a board game mainly focused on my topic of memory. The main jist of the game is that there is going to be a main character that we follow throughout his life. The players work as a team through this character's troubled life and insane events that occur. In the end, the person will be this close to dying and the team has to figure what little factor that was seen through the game caused this chain of events leading to death. This is the basic idea that we have so far. Jasmine's topic of sociology works with this because the players are working as a team. My memory topic is the main focus and forces people to remember everything. Nate's child trauma psychology could be a specific event that happened to the character. Lily's geometry could have fancy shapes involved in the final design as well.

Problems with our Project

Some issues that could occur within the production of our group project are that it could completely, utterly fail. We also have absolutely no idea what we want our game to look like or how we want to have the gameplay work. This was a draft from a  long time ago that we forgot to post.

Group Goal

Our projects are alike in that we all are interested in some sort of psychology (Lily's just trying to confuse herself, so it fits). The differences are, Andy is interested in Neuropsychological studies, Jasmine is interested in Social Psychology, and Nate is interested in Child Trauma psychology. Another similarity is that Lily and Nate are introverts, while Andy and Jasmine are extroverts. Together, we can make a positive contribution to society and be slightly decent human beings. We can assist each other by researching data about psychology and applying it to more difficult topics such as Non-Euclidean geometry. Therefore, we will begin to understand how an individual processes and retains information about such topics that require our minds to expand beyond society's expectations. We as a group are much more talented then as individuals because 4 minds are much better than 1. By researching alone, we can access information and share it with our group to see how each of our researches connects with the others topics. Our collective group goal/project will be to design a children's game that teaches about trauma, social psychology, and even some non-euclidean geometry. Andy will lead the team and design an outline for project completion, while Jasmine and Lily will do the research necessary to complete such a goal. Nate will tinker with game mechanics and assist with all other forms/bureaucratic nonsense that will need to be completed to market the game (Hopefully to teachers/School social workers)

Group Project

Our group project as of now is the develop a game (board game, online game, or otherwise) focused on teaching and using the concepts we will be learning about individually.

-CWatKPCN

Greetings from Team CWatKPCN!

This is the official group blog of COLONEL WHITE and the KUNG PAO CHICKEN NUGGETS.