Minecart Mayhem
Description
Minecart Mayhem is a game where players are trying to survive in their minecart by placing rails in front of them while the cave is collapsing behind them. In order to be the last player alive, they can choose between keeping themselves safe and sabotaging opposing players.
Rules
Design Process
Minecart Mayhem was created for the Up The River Mod project as a part of CTIN 488 at USC. Our group was tasked with taking the game Up The River and modifying it to make a new game while keeping many of the core mechanics. Our group was given two weeks to design and build the game with in-class playtests each week.
Brainstorming
When assigned this project, we decided to first analyze Up The River and identify what the core mechanics of the game were. We found that this included a game element that pushes the player to keep moving, special game elements that can hinder or help a player, and a game board that is changing. We went through a few ideas from a circular board with an enemy chasing players to a board that moves a player from the end to the beginning. In the end, we decided on designing a card game that allows players to build their own board as it continues to be destroyed behind them.
Brainstorming done in Discord’s whiteboard
Iteration 1
In our first iteration, we designed a game where players each have their own minecart on a their own rail line. They start with a hand of five cards and draw a new one every time they use a card. Each turn their minecart moves forward one tile and then the tiles at the end of their rail line gets destroyed. Players must use their own rail cards to keep building rails ahead of them so they don’t go off the rails. Using cards can go wrong though as they need to roll a dice and roll above a certain value shown on the card to successfully use it. But they also need to watch out for other players that are looking to sabotage them with cards like the dynamite, blows up the rail at the end of their rail line, and the stalactite, which blocks the player from moving forward for one turn. All of the players are aiming to be the first player to escape the cave by reaching the finish line.
In group playtest of the first iteration
Final Iteration
From playtests of the first iteration we found that there were a few problems with the game: the starting configuration led to players being eliminated too quickly, racing to a finish line did provide the sense of panic that we were aiming for, and the balancing of various cards was unfair. So in order to address these problems we first started with modifying the starting configuration to have an additional rail to both ends. This means that players have more room to take risks by using their cards to sabotage other players. For the second issue, we decided to change the goal of the game from reaching a finish line to being the last player standing. This meant players are also more incentivized to try and eliminate other players instead of just slowing them down. The change led to players feeling more panic as they are constantly being pressured to keep themselves alive as other players try to eliminate them. Now for the balancing of the cards, we found that certain cards like the stalactite had no real answer as it just pushed players back a tile and they had no way of making up that lost distance. In order to fix this we introduced a new card, the rocket, to add a counter to the stalactite. There were also other problems with other cards that required us to make a variety of changes from altering their success probability to changing how it can interact with other cards.
Setup of final iteration of Minecart Mayhem with the finalize game materials