Wednesday, November 18, 2009

WOOHOO!

Today we play tested the games. Some suggestions that our classmates gave us are to include more vowel cards and create graphics. They think that a game board is unnecessary. We removed some subject cards that we thought were too difficult. Moving forward, we plan to print new cards, buy a sand timer, include more vowels, and make a better spinner. Everyone enjoyed the game.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Hello Greeting from Alphabet Soup!!!

Today we brainstormed about all the components of the game. The spinner and the topic cards are being made.
These are some topics that we are going to have for the game:
nouns
shapes
colors
adjectives
books/magazines
words that end in y
words that end in e
food
all about school
things found in your home
things found in your kitchen
all about music
electronics
animals
countries
articles of clothing
girl names
universities
cartoon characters
movies
song titles
things found in a park
things found in a garbage can
things found in a dorm room
things found in ikea
flavors
things you would not expect to see in a church
occupations
things on the streets
brands
words with three syllables
words with more than 7 letters
things that are easy to lose
holidays
4 letter words
adverbs
character traits
words with the letter t in it
things you'd get from a supermarket

We will play several more rounds of this game to see if we can detect any flaws.

We could use a Q and X card for 2 bonus spins on the spinner.

Another idea we came across was to use a youtube video of a 30 second countdown as an alternative to buying a timer. We will include this link in the game website right by where we put the link to purchase the timer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHIU8RGphlY&feature=related

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Today is the day... We played the game.


Today we used cards from a game that is already made and we played around 10 rounds. The game play is very quick and does keep you interested due to the 30 second rounds. We’ve realized that the categories will need to be very broad in order to make it easier to get a longer list. The average list is normally either 2 to 5 words long. We only had 2 ties throughout the entire game. We’ve been tossing around several ideas to enhance the game.

  • Providing 3 letters to each player to begin with before the first round.
  • Or, providing players with 1 or 2 vowels, (A,E,I,O,U) at the beginning
  • Incorporating some type of bonus chip that would be held by the players throughout the game and allows them to put it down at the beginning of a round. After this chip is put down a second letter card will be flipped for that round, allowing the winner of the round to get both letters.
  • Allowing the person who wins for the round to forfeit their letter card in order get a spin at a wheel. This wheel would have different things on it like getting a vowel card or getting to steal a letter from an opponent or getting to swap a letter with an opponent.
  • Also the idea of using a board to monitor game progress came up. There would probably only be one game piece moving one space on the board for each turn. This would just be a visual representation of the progress of the game play.