Hare’s Bride

Single player game based on Hare's Bride

Eric Teo + Jonathan Moormann + Ben Poland

Class:

Instructor:

Final showing to Professor Zimmerman for his assessment

As part of a narrative design assignment, our team (Jonathan Moorman, Benjamin Poland and me) were given the fable “Hare’s Bride”. We set about initially designing a game which incorporated the entire story. After some playtesting, we fine tuned it into a solo game where the player will be the bride trying to escape from the Hare. We focused on this part of the story because it was the most impactful portion. Player will have an initial section where he is building up his disguise in order to facilitate him running away later. After a while, the player will decide when to escape and when that happens, the second section of the game will begin. This requires the player to roll dice and meet the corresponding table number to as to move his pawn to that table. If the Hare catches up to him (via bad die roll or insufficient disguise cards to delay), then he loses. Otherwise if the player manages to reach the last table, then he has escaped the Hare.

Board art and layout is designed by me and Jonathan created the art and cards.

One of the interesting lessons I learnt in this was the importance of Rituals. In the game, player needs to knock on the table to symbolize the Hare knocking on the door to ask the Bride to come out. When the player does this knocking, he draws a card for the Hare which will limit the type of disguise cards he can then play. In this way, it signifies the Hare’s turn to the player and for the player to pay attention to the new information.

One of the challenges we faced was the randomness the dice roll can bring to the game, not only in terms of mechanisms but also the overall “feeling” of the game. Initially it felt as if the two sections were disconnected (played differently) but I believe in the end with a few tweaks to the design, we made it a cohesive experience.

Playtesting