Designing a card game to model coral reefs - please help with mechanics

[Maria Droujkova]

A learning coop I co-lead is working on designing a card game, similar to Pokemon or Phylo, but focusing on the Caribbean ecosystems specifically. I would like to ask this group for resources and advice on balancing the game mechanics. Do you know other good people who may know that?

Overall, we want the rules of the game to model mathematics and science of an ecosystem. The artwork of each individual card will use crochet, origami and other mathematically rich media to model surfaces and shapes. This invites students developing or playing the game to engage with many types of modeling.

The current draft for the rules of the game is here:  http://healingoceanstogether.wordpress.com/donate-2/456-2/ 

We also have a crowdfunding campaign going to support the game. In the next two weeks, I would greatly appreciate it if you tweeted, blogged or otherwise spread the word about it: http://www.indiegogo.com/H2O?a=584370 Every link helps to rise the ranking of the campaign, which makes it more visible. 

This is the second game-related crowdfunding gig I am doing. I loved the first campaign as well, which successfully raised money for Moebius Noodles, a community portal and a book about advanced math games for children from birth to five. The first edition of the book and the portal are expected to be out this summer.

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova
919-388-1721

Make math your own, to make your own math

 

[Maria Droujkova]

On Sat, May 12, 2012 at 4:07 PM, Timothy Charoenying <timo...@berkeley.edu> wrote:

- my initial impression of Phylo, in particular, is that it's too complex/complicated. While there is a niche population that loves the complexity of intricate, well thought out games, the majority of the population--in which most teachers fall into--will find the barrier to entry too high. I'd recommend that you not go in the direction of phylo/pokemon, unless you know your target demographic are highly motivated boys :) (same problem with Pokemon. competitive aspect doesn't appeal as much to the typical school age "girl," and from my observations, even the boys who play it make up the rules as they go along, much akin to Piaget's classic study of the game of marbles.

This has been my experience with Pokemon, as well - kids just making up their own rules. And again, girls don't usually feel like doing something like that. We talked about designing the game, or some steps toward it, so people can start playing within the first five minutes. With Pokemon, it's more like an hour of reading rules before you can start. 

Our preliminary idea was to design the game with levels. The first few levels are card-based sorting or matching puzzles. Solving those, kids become familiar with cards. Then they can play the reef-building game. 

What do you think of this idea?

- I haven't thought too deeply about possible game mechanics, but an idea that popped in mind immediately was a "poker" model. The particular concept I imagined was a "food chain," and that a "winning" hand would be akin to a  "complete" food chain, made of a minimum of three cards -- e.g., some predator, some prey, some food source (i.e. shark --> tuna -->  Algae). Using this model, a hand of shark -> tuna -> sardine -> algae (4 link chain) would "beat" the previous 3 link chain... ;)

Interesting! I think it's worth investigating. Different food chains can be like different suits.

Women don't play poker as much as men either, do they?

Cheers,

MariaD