EPortfolio Post 5

 The four games I played this week during the playtesting period were: Treats and Trials, Race to Dragon Enclave, H.O.P.E, and Haunting at Midnight.

The game I’m analyzing the formal elements of is a H.O.P.E which is a survival sci-fi game where the players have to ward off and survive an alien invasion. 

The game’s formal elements are: 

Information 

-Information is given at the beginning of the game by watching the trailer made by the game designers, which establishes the start of the game and establishes the player's motivation for why the players are the ones fighting against the alien threat. 

-By establishing an alien threat it gives the players a sense of urgency and obligations that need to be fulfilled.

Decision Making

-The main decisions that the players make are where to go on the game board between each card drawing round. 

-The players decide where to go on the game board and pick what order building needs to be cleared in.

Resources

-Health packs are hidden through the playing card deck for the player to use to regain health or to stash for emergencies.

-Weapons are hidden and allow the players to do bonus damage to the alien threat rather than the plain base 10 unarmed damage.

-Hope components are hidden in the card deck and once drawn a building is considered safely cleared, the hope components are needed to build the H.O.P.E device to defeat the aliens.

Objectives

-The objective of the game is to survive the alien invasion and beat them back from invading earth.

-The other objective is to build the H.O.P.E device to aid in your fight against the alien invasion. 

Players

-This is a two to six player coop game. 

-The players don’t play against each other, they play against the game system itself.

-This game functions off of player cooperation, so it is recommended 

Player-Interaction

-This game attracts players that fall into the categories of achievers and explorers. 

-The goal of this game is to explore the game board and discover useful items and the H.O.P.E components.

-The overall objective of the game is to defeat the alien invasion.

Rules

-The rules of the game are clearly stated and organized, split into several sections. 

-By clearly separating the rules it means it is easy to refer back to them for reference or to try and clarify possible confusing points of game play.

Game-State

-The game has several objects that help set up the game board and the magic circle that the game takes place in. 

Sequencing

-This is a turn-based game where the players each draw a card, depending on the card drawn that establishes how the next round goes. 

-While the game is turned based there are two distinct sections of the game. A pre-game and an active game section. 

Theme
-The theme of this game is a science fiction game that hinges on an alien invasion. The catalyst of this is the player character’s finding a dead soldier’s body and receiving orders to rebuild the H.O.P.E device. The goal of this game is to survive the alien invasion and build the H.O.P.E device.