Board Games

This week we continued to look at the elements of effective games. Mr Jon came into class and we played a game he created about the food value chain. We gave him feedback on the game and made suggestions for improvements.

Many of us have been having difficulty with our own game plans. To help with our games, Anton's father helped us set up a Skype interview with Jesper at Lego in Denmark. We asked him questions and were interested in his responses. Here are some of the things we found out:

• He works for Lego - working with people to design new toys.
• He heard about the job through a friend of his who was working there.
• The ideas for his games never come to him the same way...but they usually start with either a theme or a mechanism that capture his imagination.
• Games need different features to make them successful - it really depends on who is playing the game and whether it is for fun or a strategic game. Successful games can't be too easy to win...otherwise the players get bored.
• The most popular games at the moment are strategic and cooperative games.
• A game takes 1/2 year to 8 months to design and another year to release. They test the games throughout the process.

We really appreciated Jesper taking the time to talk to us and have started applying what we learned to fine-tune our own designs.

Summer Holiday Notices