Boredom Empire is a small boardgame created in a team of 6 almost by accident. It was a part of a system design course at Uppsala University where we had many physical game pieces at our disposal. Those turned out to be so fidgety, many started building towers and castles out of them during design meetings. And that's how Boredom Empire was created.
It's a project with a surprisingly engaging game loop that solves one of the board game's cursed problems: you wouldn't need to wait for someone else to finish their turn. In Boredom Empire, the goal is to build the tallest structure. You would only have to stop when it's under attack!
Team: 6 People Roles: Management, Design, Testing Duration: 3 Weeks
Ideation
Building something out of small parts is a creative experience and allowing players to build anything would make for a continuously engaging experience. We needed to come up with constraints that would allow players take a new approach each time they play but also not limit them too much that one strategy always prevails.
Balance
The tough part was to nail the balance between the attacking and the building. The game rewards both but not to a perfect extent, mainly because the development was 5 iterations long. But even then, even games of a larger scale remain to have some sort of a meta strategy which, while seems to be the most optimal, is often hardest to execute. More on that here.
