Board Game Design

The book Understanding Popular Culture by John Fiske inspired this game, which is based on the cycle of incorporation and excorporation that Fiske outlines. Players make products, which they then sell to other players for a high price. Players can then modify their products to try and score the most points from their personality card, which other players are trying to guess. A great game that teaches the power struggle between producers and consumers.

Based on the classic board games Coup and Secret Hitler, Don't Be Caesar is a social deduction game based around the time of Caesar's rise to power. Players take actions by funding the military, the church, or the people, and then reciveve payments based on which faction recived the most money. However, if every player except one uses a knife, they kill that player and end the game. This is why you don't wanna be Caesar, folks.

A school project for my Project Management capstone class, I designed a card game based around balancing quality, funds, and timing. A randomly shuffled deck of situations would have teams of students make choices to balance those three pillars of project management.  The professor was very pleased, and planned on using the game as his first assignment for his introductory class. 

Download the Print and Play below.

My original experience with designing game mechanics was creating a board game as a laser engraving project. The game involved collecting food to survive each round of the game, but the required amount of food increased, leading to players competing more and more for foraging spots and weapons. It created a rising tension that made an admittedly unsophisticated system still fun to play.