MIT OpenCourseWare http ocw mit edu CMS 608 CMS 864 Game Design Spring 2008 For information about citing these materials or our Terms of Use visit http ocw mit edu terms Fluxx The Board Game Sharat Bhat Charles Tam Karena Tyan April 17 2008 1 Concept Fluxx in its original form is a card game noted for being very easy to pick up and play both in the sense that the rules are simple and presented unambiguously on the relevant cards and that the game is small portable and allows for a varying number of players even within a single iteration of the game The card types include Rules which determine the current rules of play Actions which have an e ect when played and then are discarded and Keepers and Goals which determine the winner s of the game The winning conditions are dictated on each Goal card and typically feature some combination of Keeper cards The only meta rules are that when a player enters the game he draws three cards and adds himself to the circle of players this applies both to starting the game and to adding a player in mid game that play occurs in a turn based fashion proceeding around the circle of players and that a player s turn is composed of rst Drawing then Playing Our adaptation of Fluxx as a board game aimed to preserve the uid nature of the game as much as possible The idiomatic Draw 1 Play 1 changed to Draw 1 Place 1 Move 1 The game now requires a board and tokens Instead of Playing cards so that they immediately have e ect cards are Placed onto the board Then in order to activate an Action card a token must land on or be moved over it Similarly a player is considered to be in possession of a Keeper only when he has a token on it Note that this means that multiple players can be in possession of a Keeper or that a single player can own multiple instances of the same Keeper If a Goal is met by multiple players then all those players win Our board game version of Fluxx di ers from the original primarily through the additional layer of strategy provided by the physical layout of the cards and the availability of Placed Action cards to any player Whereas in the Fluxx card game Action cards are Played by one player immediately from their hand our board game version both delays the e ects of Action cards and makes them available to all players within reach once Placed Board game Fluxx also leaves you more vulnerable to retaliation or blocked movement if the None Shall Pass rule is in play Players can decide the order they use their Place and Move options allowing them some measure of immediate e ect from Actions placed Players will generally Place bene cial Actions in the path of their tokens However players can also hinder opponents by Moving rst and Placing o ensive Actions in their trail to discourage pursuers Furthermore as players are forced to show their strategy by laying out Action cards on the board opponents have the potential to pre empt those strategies if the number of Moves available to the Placing player is less than the number of cards the player wishes to activate In general the board game version of Fluxx allows for spatial strategy and more interaction amongst players than the card version Since our game was designed to give the experience of playing Fluxx in a board game most of the design centered around recreating the the aesthetic experience of the original Fluxx card game We tried to create gameplay mechanics that t in with the original game s feeling of constant change As a result we made the 1 board change as cards are placed onto it The mechanics were largely created to match the aesthetics of the original game The token limit was added to add an analogy to the Keeper limit and several other cards were added almost directly from the original Fluxx game In order to add our own bit of personality to the game without compromising the feel of the card game we changed to Keepers and Goals to be more relevant to our lives We later had to adjust the mechanics to balance the game and match the strategies in the original Fluxx game but overall our goal was to create mechanics that created an environment that felt the same as the Fluxx card game 2 First Iteration DRAW 1 PLACE 1 GOAL MOVE 1 TOKEN LIMIT 1 Figure 1 The Central Nine Seed Squares To keep with the general concept of Fluxx we allowed the shape and size of the board to change during play At the beginning of the game the board consisted of only nine seed squares Figure 1 The board could be expanded by playing Actions and Keepers to locations adjacent to existing tiles To limit board growth each player could only Place Actions adjacent to his own tokens consequentially tokens could only move to parts of the board that had already been created by Placing and blanking cards We also considered the possibility of destroying portions of the board Action cards designed for this purpose drew a distinction between erasing a tile which removed the Keeper or Action residing in a location but left a blank tile there and deleting a 2 tile which removed the tile itself and any cards or tokens occupying that location We were focused more on mechanics this game so we played with the Keepers and Goals de ned in normal Fluxx We also used most of the Rules and Actions therein but some of them had to be modi ed to t with the idiom of the board game1 For example Keeper Limit cards were changed to Token Limit cards thus imposing a hard limit on the number of Keepers a player could possess but in a di erent manner We also added cards that allowed for token creation and deletion Generally speaking the biggest shortcoming of this iteration was the lack of interaction between player s tokens Players would still use Actions to swap hands or create chains of drawing and placing as they would have in normal Fluxx However the unlimited growth of the board led players to separate from one another after six or seven turns each player would create his own branch of tiles and remain isolated there Figure 2 Basically players grew to be too far apart from each other and there was very little they could do to each other beyond the hand manipulation that original Fluxx featured To remedy this we limited the size of the board to 11 by 11 and introduced more o ensive cards to the deck b b a c d d d Figure 2 Branching and Player Isolation in Iteration One 3 Second Iteration For this iteration the board size was xed to 11 by 11 The center of the board was arranged as before but all squares started the game as blank Deletion