Christmas Blowout
What is Christmas Blowout?
Christmas Blowout is a family board game. Families are usually gathering during Christmas to share a moment of peace and joy and... to eat! In Christmas Blowout the players try to eat more than the others, choosing among the different kind of courses. Only the hungriest will seize the victory!
The game is divied in three turns called Appetizers, Main Course and Dessert, during which the players have to roll dice to see what kind of food they are going to eat for that turn. The stomach can contain just a limited amount of food so players have to decide how to place their food cubes in order to avoid puking. Players have cards that can help them to eat more, force other players to eat or avoid puking. At the end of the game, the player who has more food point wins.
My experience
While designing Christmas Blowout I always tried to keep in mind what makes a party game shine: light team, almost no downtime, a good amount of luck.
These are the features that I wanted for the game, even considering the fact that I had just one month to design, prototype and finish the game.
At the beginning the game didn't have any sort of food shape for the players: after some playtesting I realized that forcing the players to place their food cubes following particular shapes would have added more meaningful decisions during the game. On top of this, the mechanic helped out in achieving that state where luck is used in the game to create memorable moment instead of a mere mean to introduce randomness.
Cards were added for the same reason: even if just rolling dice seemed fine, the game was lacking a mechanic that could be used in between turns and could be used to plan short, medium and long term strategies. In order to balance the use of cards, I came up with the idea of giving dice a new mean, now turning them into action points that players could spend not only to eat food but to play cards as well. This mechanic alone increased the strategy level of the game while keeping the rules accessible and the game fun and fast, thanks to the cards' actions.
Game cards with icon system for more clarity