As you may have seen in our recent Twitch stream, we have created a card game to go with Project Knoxville. Now we would like to share it with you. You can download it here.
In our card game you are contestants put into a hostile Arena. Your goal is to escape alive, but also grab as many coins you can manage. That is easier said than done when bears, wolves, and other contestants may be hounding you for that one coin you managed to grab. This is where allies could come in handy. Throughout the game you have to balance the greed for coins, as well as just surviving the Arena itself, and other players. Forge alliances with each other or go at it alone.
Playing a match of this game is interesting but we strongly recommend playing 3-5 matches to allow grudges and alliances to be nourished and grow into interesting situations.
During a design meeting regarding how to best handle consequence of player actions in a game like Knoxville, an idea was born. The idea was to try and exemplify consequences through a simple card game, also known as a paper prototype.
Paper prototypes are nothing new to the games industry. Several books and academic texts are written about them, and many of the games you play have probably started out as paper prototypes. The advantage to paper prototypes is that you can figure out core game mechanics for any genre of game, and you can quickly iterate and change rules and mechanics, without having to do any code, art or level design work. It can be as simple as writing a new post-it note.
The ultimate goal of this particular paper prototype was to try and emulate player interactions and psychological mechanisms through a card game. To try and figure out meaningful mechanics for fragile alliances where coop and teamwork could work in a competitive and hostile environment.
The card game is the work of designers Asger Strandby and Bjarne Kristiansen, with a ton of input from pretty much everybody else in the company as they were roped in for prototype testing. The game started out on a lot of post-it notes, was reiterated on and tested many times, before we started printing something resembling actual cards, which had the added benefit of not sticking to everything.
We believe that we created a game that has yielded a lot of interesting observations about player interactions that can be lifted over to the digital prototype. We have also created a really fun game and we want to share it with the world.
Just like the digital game, this is completely open development and we are very open to dialogue, feedback and rule changes. If you and your friends come up with some cool variants on the gameplay and/or rules, we would love to hear about it and maybe incorporate it into the official game.
We will also try our best to keep the game updated on this page, so stay tuned. The game will always be free to download and print, but ultimately we want to be able to offer a paid version printed as a proper game, with box art and all those fancy things.
Source: Microsoft Studios
Asher is a games journalist, former News Writer (Gaming) at Windows Central. They contributed 1110 articles to ICXM between 2015–2017, focused on opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: wrote over 1,100 ICXM pieces on Xbox news, hardware reviews, and platform commentary before joining Future plc’s Windows Central in 2017.