Game of the Year: The Board Game is live (Video Game entrepreneur)
Update: Game of the Year: The Board Game is live on Kickstarter and the campaign will run for 14 days. You may pledge for a copy of the game.
Our preview post below was published on June 24.
Game of the Year: The Board Game is a 1-4 player card drafting and dice rolling game, in which you try to develop the most successful video game to gain the most sales and hype. It will launch on Kickstarter on June 28.
The game is played in three rounds. In each round, you start by drawing two rivals, one of which you will compete against at the end of the round. Then, you have the Pitching Phase, in which you can buy upgrades (that may be instant effects or permanent perks), take a genre for your game that matches the genre of one of the two rivals’ games, and select features and themes for your upcoming game. Features and themes are cards that show a small resource track that you will have to fill to complete the cards and include the selected themes and features in your final product.
You then go through three successive Development Phases. You have two dice pools (your teams) and must roll all of them. On each face of the dice is one of the six resources. Once the dice are rolled, you pick up one of your teams and get the corresponding resources to complete development tracks on your card. You must complete the tracks in order, but you do not need to match the shown symbol. If you don’t, you place a bug token; if you do, you place a star token. Completing cards get you instant rewards. All unused dice will cause additional bugs to your games.
Then comes the shipping phase. You discard all theme and features that did not get completed and calculate the value of your game as the sum of all star tokens, minus the sum of all bugs. You then compare your game’s value to that of your rival and move your hype score by the value difference (up and down depending on who’s made the best game!). You start with a hype of 4; if it ever goes to 0, you instantly lose the game. Next, you collect sales from the game, money being used to purchase upgrades and for the final phase of the round, the clean-up. In that phase, you have to cover your company costs which increase every round. If you run out of money and cannot cover these costs, you go bankrupt and lose the game.
At the end of the three rounds, the Game Of The Year ceremony takes place. You compare your best game value to that of the Boss game you randomly picked up at the beginning of the game. If you beat it, you gain an additional 5 points. You also receive a bonus of 2 points if one of your games sells more than a given threshold (the People’s Choice award). You also receive as many points as your three games' final value. Your final score ranks you in one of the six tiers, starting from Delusional Amateur to Legendary Developer.