​The Memoirs of Mississippi Smith.

My Role: Lead Designer
Team size: 5
September 2019 - January 2020
The Memoirs of Mississippi Smith is a modular board game prototype created during my 2nd Year of studies as part of my Prototyping and Iterating Game Designs module. It takes inspiration from games such as Betrayal at House on the Hill and the Indiana Jones movie franchise. The game is centred around cooperative gameplay and holds a large amount of replay-ability, with the board being built as players explore the environment and win conditions dependent upon which mission card is picked from the deck before play. Internal and external play-testing was also conducted to check that the game was balanced and players enjoyed the experience.

​I was the Lead Designer on the project, and worked with 4 other designers to create the prototype.
My Role.
​As Lead Designer, I led the team in brainstorming and refinement meetings to determine the core set of mechanics. One of these sessions involved an organised play session of other board games to help us figure out what types of mechanics would be appropriate for our high concept idea of a modular board game. I was also in charge of creating and maintaining the game's rulebook and design documentation.

Through iterative play testing, we were able to balance the game to make both player and enemy stats as even as possible. I also facilitated external play testing sessions with our peers to find out whether the game worked and was fun to play.
What went well?
  • ​There was a quick iterative process, with quick implementation of changes to mechanics and player and enemy stats.
  • A good level of team work meant that we had many ideas available to try and fix any issues we were finding with mechanics and and stats, testing them all out until we found a solution.
  • The choice of materials used to create the second prototype meant that it was a successful build, with each of the board pieces fitting perfectly together and the cards being thick enough to shuffle without difficulty.
What could have been improved?
  • ​We focused too much on getting the game perfect through internal play-tests, so we did not have as much time to conduct external play-tests as I would have liked.
  • The size of the room tiles and door tokens have made the game quite fiddly, so should we undertake a project like this again the game pieces should be made slightly larger so they are easier to handle.
  • Player and enemy tokens need to be changed from colour-based identification to a more silhouette or letter based one so they don’t look similar to people with colour-blindness.