Snakes & Ladders

From the Article we read on Formal Abstract Design Tools we made iterations on the game Snakes & Ladders to identify where the game could be improved.

The game originally has little perceivable consequences. The whereabouts of consequences are known, but when they will happen remains a mystery, which is decided by the luck of the dice roll. There are no intentions, the game is completely at random and the player makes no choices. There is no story apart from the players journey from start to finish, which is different to the Indian version which is completely story driven.

Our first iteration was based around giving the player a choice. The player would roll the dice, if it would mean they land on a snake, the player would make a decision, to move on to the snake and challenge it, or choose to move backwards by the amount on the dice. If they decided to challenge the snake, a dice would be thrown for the snake and one for the player. The highest would obviously win. Most times you would challenge it, unless moving backwards was worse than where the snake would drop you.

In our second iteration we actually got rid of challenging the snake but we added cards instead.
Instead the player starts of with 4 cards which they pick up from a deck of 1-6. They would then be able to choose the card they want to move that amount of spaces.
You would need a card in your possession to move up ladders and also be able to block the snakes ability to slide down the board.

I did come up with another idea where the player could use the ability to bluff their opponent by choosing to have their card face down. But that would have made it much too complicated but would have gave the player a feeling of anxiousness.

We were then asked to create a story within the game and we ended up deciding on implementing two types of characters. One was a Fireman who could climb ladders and fall down snakes, and another would be a Snake-whisperer which can climb up snakes but falls down ladders. To make this fair we would have to make sure that the ladders and snakes were evenly distributed.

Other ideas we thought of were to be able to drop tokens at the bottom or top of the snakes and ladders which would make them unusable. However it is important to keep play testing our ideas and with that idea and many others there just wasn't enough time and we would have lost the concept of the game by adding too many features.

Conclusion
After adding different components and play testing them we believe the game was more enjoyable and interesting to play due to it being more competitive and the player has more to think about than just moving by the roll of a dice. I think also allowing the player to bluff has more of a challenge but it needs to be more refined to use with the other mechanics.