Serious Play and Tooth Fairy Board Game

Reading Response

After reading "Nature and Signifigance of Play as a cultural Phenomenon" by Johan Huizinga I found that I had always wondered why do we Humans play?  I used to think that it was part of the earliest forms of story telling when hunters would regal the tribe with the story of their hunt and act it out.  Turns out I was partially right.  Play has been part of forming Human culture but not in the sense where "play" became "ritual" rather, play being somehow important to an individual such as a brief mild distraction from the mundane world.  While play is fun, it is also very serious, for example when playing Poker you have to keep your "poker face" or when playing "Dungeons and Dragons" you and your party have to form strategies on the fly to make it through the Dungeon Master's booby traps.  Essentially, when you play you are leaving one reality and entering a different one with its own set of rules that must be followed just like in the "real" world, the main difference in play is that the rules provide a framework and make play more interesting and challenging.

Making a Board Game for the First Time

I never made a board game before, but it was much harder than I thought it would be.  Not only did Tram and I have to decide on what the game would even be, we had to come up with what the objective was, how players could achieve it, and then how to make it harder and interesting.

I had the ideas in my head, the hard part was getting them out onto a peice of paper and lacking some materials we had to get creative on some parts such as game pecies and a spinner.

Figuring out the rules was the hardest part. Tram and I were going for a Candyland meets monopoly sort of thing on collecting teeth and what space you landed on affected your over all tooth collection and progress, for example if you landed on a cavity, you had to return to your original space and if you landed on a toothbrush you collected a tooth.

 

 

I always liked playing with office supplies and I finally got to really play with them by using staples as the peices!

 

As for the feedback, our beta suggested that there should also be a space that allowed the players to steal teeth from eachother too and that everyone starts off with two teeth.

 

Even though designing the game was pretty nerve wracking and I was rather worn out, I was happy and worn out.