Alter is designed to promote cognitive development in it's players. In this strategy board game, you manipulate the Elements across a fantastical warfield of continents to gain dominion and ultimately, victory. Keeping cognitive growth in focus, Alter requires you to deal with many variables all at once, which exercises mental dexterity. A simple change of standard elimination mechanics, transforms Alter into a game that can help develop minds that are more pre-disposed to risk-taking, systems thinking, and lateral planning.
Alter is a concise game whose core mechanic is inspired by one principle: the interaction of two opposing forces does not end in the stronger eliminating the weaker but rather,
Mechanics Design
Game Concept
Iterative Playtesting
“The stronger force transmuting the weak into something that in turn, returns to keep the strong force in check.”
Alter
In Alter's design, alchemy, transmutation, nature cycles and dynamic interaction of complex systems are core themes.
Strategy Board Game
Through this project, I explored:
How to abstract forces into simple mechanics
Adding new mechanics to augment existing mechanics
Balancing pieces and win conditions towards specific outcomes
Iterating and playtesting to identify desirable behavior in players and tweaking towards the intended design.
Creating graphic symbols with a good balance between the abstract and the representational.
Outcome & Impact
In Alter, you place Elements on your home continent and move them around the conquerable continents to seize dominion. A majority of an Element held in each continent secures it for your side. But, your opponent will employ their Elements to transmute some of yours so that the majority is contested. And this herein contains the essence of the game and altering opposing elements with your own is where the game derives its name.
Prompted by an academic brief, Alter was inspired by the Nickelodeon classic "Avatar the Last Airbender". In efforts to capture the essence of the story themes, I abstracted the interplay of the 4 elements - air, water, earth, fire; which are key elements of the series, into a board game.
In playtesting with peers, faculty, friends and family I observed the effects the designed mechanics had on people - the ever-changing cycle of altering led to game states that quickly flipped between extremeties of near victory and near loss. Players were constantly on edge, gripped by the need to grasp their total solution, to prevent quick losses and to flip the situation to their gain - that too, across multiple fronts.
At first, the game world was too small to support longer games, and in the second iteration I changed the few, static continents into more pieces that players could randomly choose the number and arrangement of, at the beginning of the game. This led to longer games and more variables, increasing the order of dexterity needed to keep up. A player stated during a playtest that "the game was keeping them in flow", and this was the first confirmation that the design was beginning to work.
The Rules
The next iteration saw the addition of Species - after a regular number of rounds, you may exchange Elements for a Species: Dragons, Colossi, Avians and Magoi, all of which are force multipliers that work on your Elements to expand your influence quicker.
With each iteration I tweaked the number of rounds between which you could avail a Species. And one specific iteration spurred me to add a parallel win condition: traveling a full loop from your home to opponent home and back home.
Alter was a game I designed with no prior experience or knowledge of game design. Observing the behavior it induced in players i.e. an engaging intellectual challenge and the positive effects of their experience is what first opened my eyes to the possibilities of game design and put me on what I now consider my life's path.
To conclude,