La lisière de R'yleh

Introduction

"La lisière de R'yleh" is a game prototype conceived from a game jam organised in our university course. There was differents conditions on this game jam :

  • Create a board game
  • Be in group of 3 person

In my group, there was one graphiste, Marina Velasco, one mediator and crafter, Adrien Chateau and me as Game Designer.

This game jam had for theme "The more you have, the worse it gets" and 3 conditions on the board game itself.

  • A game of around 15 minutes
  • A game to play between 2 and 6 players
  • The audience is ourself
box of the board game

Game idea

Setup of the game

Our idea was a card game, based on the principle of creature capture, called Offspring. We understood from the theme that the game should have a decadent mechanic as the game progresses. Players should have a constraint punishing them if they capture too much offspring.

The goal of the game is to capture all the offspring in the forest without angering the elders, in which case the game ends. Each player's turn, they can capture an offspring by placing an offspring they already have in front of them and comparing their value plus adding bonuses through cards and other systems.

This game is symmetrical, each player has the same gameplay. Moreover, this game is played in teams, 1 vs 1, 2 vs 2, 3 vs 3 or 4 vs 4. The idea of making it a team fighting game was to create cooperation and to allow mutual help on the elder fights.

For the decadent mechanics, we thought of an anger gauge that brings out creatures called, elders, which are much stronger and more dangerous to fight. However, we also wanted to reward the team that manages to win by giving a minor bonus in the game.

Visual works

All the artistic direction was to mix the horror of the elders and the incomprehensible with the cuteness of the offspring, a more friendly child version of the creatures.

All these graphics were made by our graphic artist based on references from the Cthulhu universe.

This cards are the offspring design, they exist with different values and are regroup on the family of the elders.

The creation of the game board was done in three segments for the packaging and the layout of the elements. Most of the graphic elements are based on the book Cthulhu: Creatures of the Myth

Difficulties encountered

Creating a board game is much harder than it looks.

Having an idea for a board game on the theme wasn't hard, but the problem was more in the constraints, our game idea didn't fit in 15 minutes of play and required much more time. Adjusting the idea to fit the game time lowered some mechanics or dumbed down the game.

Finding a correct balance of cards was difficult, while finding actions of some other cards, which are neither too powerful nor too weak, does not help.

Board game collection of cards