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.