Testing Uno Game Mod

Wednesday- I went to game design club to test out my game mod.

I first played my game un-moded, and as usual the game started out very boring, at least to me because I find Uno to be a very boring and simple game. So then I brought in the mods!

First up I brought in my off-the-wall mods to immediately spice things up. I implemented one of my color mechanics, yellow first. So at first it proved to be very successful, because it got people to yell, have fun, and argue about who said the keyword first, which was my original intention. Something I didn’t think about however is that in Uno, the color stay the same for a while and I didn’t set a limit on how many times the mechanic worked, so after a while the mechanic started to get tiring, and everyone stopped participating. As soon as I found out about this, on the fly I changed it so that the mechanic is limited to only valid when the first set of yellow cards is played after a color change.

            I then implemented another color mechanic on top of my other color mechanic, because in my original thinking, my idea was to have a keyword mechanic for each color. This worked fine for a couple of rounds, better yet, people were anxious to see a yellow on yellow or a red on red. These mechanics I found suffer from being fun at first to getting trying at the end.

            In retrospect I should have set a limit on the color mechanics somewhere in the middle because I went from having it work every time there is a same color on same color card, to only the first time the color is changed. This changed the occurance rate of the mechanic from 60% to almost 30%. I should have tried to get a 45% occurance rate by setting the limit in the middle to get it to balance out and see if the mechanic stays fun longer.

            Finally, I brought in my counter mechanic, which was the only “card” mechanic I managed to implement in the game due to time. Countering, I found, proved to be very successful almost always. It seemed to be very balanced right off the bat. You can counter any card at any moment and have the opponent put it right back to their hand. This prevented people form winning the game or setting down a powerful draw 4 wild card. However, since it brings the card back to their hand, it only delays the play (in most cases anyways).

            My end goal was to have everyone laugh, have fun, argue, dispute, and make enemies and friends. I believe I succeeded in this at least. I am in the right path. My next step is to balance these mechanics alone. After their balanced, I think it’d be in my best interest to simplify some of the core mechanics further, in order to implement the following more complex mechanics into the game.