541 Class Assignment: "Name that Game"
Tracy, who I understand just broke her fingers! (my sympathies), instructed us to take ideas from bits of magazines, and make a kind of board game with them. With scissors, glue and card stock, we cut-up two copies of Variety and a copy of the LA Times and made a set of flash cards for our concept. The game involved players competing against one another to come up with creative answers to a set of funny questions. They were to compose the answers to questions like "Name a new children's breakfast cereal" from a stack of words we dealt them. Their answers were judged, by us, and the winner was awarded points as well as got to collect the other players' cards. The object of the game was to score the most points and collect as many cards as possible.
Originally when we beta tested the idea ourselves we used only one card to answer, but prior to having the other group play we decided that they could use multiple cards to compose an answer. The results were that in their first try they used like 4 cards and their answers didn't seem to make much sense (at least to me). Interestingly, this problem immediately regulated itself once the player saw that they would end up loosing those cards, and in subsequent turns players put down only one or two cards on average.
While I think we were all a bit pleased with our clever ideas when we came up with it, in execution it seemed not to work so well since we had the context for how it was supposed to work, and were, presumably willing to overlook the flaws in the idea.
An interesting exercise and a valuable technique for taking an idea from concept to bare bones realization in very little time.