changes to the game of ur

Introduction

In this essay I will be talking about game design and mechanics as applied for the game of Ur and incremental changes I have made to the game of Ur. I will explain which changes I have made that worked well and which changes I tried that did not work and so where discarded. I will explain the reasons why I discarded some and kept the others based on the readings that I have done so far over the course of the year.

The game of Ur

The following is the original basis of play for the game of Ur. The game of Ur was played with 2 sets of pieces one black and one white. The game board is laid out with 20 squares. It has 6 safe squares for each player and 8 squares in the centre. Each player has 4 safe squares where the pieces can enter and 2 right near the finish.

The centre line is where each player can battle it out in order to win.

In the centre there are safe spots where the players cannot be taken and if a player lands on one of these they get another go as well.

These safe spots are also in the players safe zones in order to give the player another go and that way they can get more than one piece on the board in their first turn which if that happens on the first turn they will get a small advantage on the other player.

A player can take another players piece by landing on them but this requires the exact roll. In order for a player to win they have to get to the end of the board and roll the exact number of spaces left +1 in order to get a game piece of the board. In order for a player to win they have to get all the pieces of their pieces of the board before the other player.

I also discovered that the game of Ur is the predecessor of backgammon.

My opinion

I think the game is well balanced and is really fun to play for a while but after you have played it a few times it gets boring and very repetitive.    With a few changes you can change the game in such a way that things always change either in a big way or in a small way depending on the players luck.

Types of players and how the Changes to the game of Ur will enhance the gameplay for those players

I decided to use d3s with tipex on one corner for the dice because it’s the closest thing we have today to what they used in the past.

There are 4 types of players, killers, achievers, socialisers and explorers.

Killers focus on hindering other players as much as possible rather than winning the game.

Achievers like there to be some sort of reward for doing something in the game and the harder it is to do the more rewarding it has to be, for example on the Xbox 360 they have an achievement system in there and the longer it takes a player to do something the more achievement points they get.  

Instead of a player getting another go from landing on the safe spots I decided to give them other rolls on each turn depending on the results. This will benefit achievers because they may be able to win faster.

Explorers like to explore the game and discover everything about it; this can give them a big advantage against the other players in the long run. When rolling and re rolling a player rolls the 4 marked d3s and for each marked side they move that many spaces and then they can re roll the marked dice.

  The change I explained before would allow explorers to see how to win the game quicker than in the old version and they may be able to use this to their advantage with only a few games

Socialisers prefer to just talk to other players and tend not to worry about winning the game. I decided that the game didn’t need a change for socialisers because it is already a social game in the fact that you have to play it with someone else if it was an online game I would put a chat function in there to make it more fun for them.

Of course a lot of people fall into at least 2 of these categories for example you get people that are achievers and killers at the same time and this kind of player like games that gives rewards for hindering the other player/s in the game.  

I decided to give a reward for taking out another player piece which appeals to killers. Killers go out of their way to kill other players (this may also distract them from the strategy of the game) and I thought that it would be a good idea to have a reward for it other than sending the other piece back to the start. In order to do this I made it so that when a player lands on the other player’s piece it sends it back and they get to recover one dice that they lost in the roll. This was intended at first to just appeal to killers but as a result it ended up appealing to someone who is a killer, an achiever and an explorer and even someone who has any 2 of them or even all 3. This is because killers can kill players and get the buzz of doing it, achievers would get a reward for doing it and explorers would be able to explore the game a bit faster.

All of the changes would give players more of the sense of a ticking clock (the game is much faster so they have to win faster).

“The idea of a ticking clock is the sense of imminent resolution that gives the game its sense of momentum and forward progress”. (Quote 1)

While there is no actual ticking clock, players while still feel like there is less time for them to win because one player can get a huge lead if they are lucky at the start. But this also gives a player the chance to catch up if they are behind.

Other types of players include casual and hardcore.

The game of Ur appeals to the more casual players but the changes that I have made to it may make it appeal to the hardcore players as well because one of the changes adds more strategy to the game, but the game is still really easy to play so the casual players will still enjoy it.

The changes I made that I decided didn’t work

Some of the changes I tried weren’t worth using because they either made the game not very fun, they made the game unbalanced or it was just too quick.

One of the changes I tried was making it so there were only the safe spots where the player starts and this took a lot of the strategy out of the game which made the game boring and all luck based.  This would affect the explorers the most because there is less for them to discover within the game and they would get bored of it much faster.

Another change was when a player sends the opposing players back to the start they get all the dice back which sometimes gave one player a huge lead and the other player couldn’t recover. This made the game really boring for the losing player as well as for the winning player.  The reason it’s boring for the losing player is because they know that there is no way they can come back and that makes the player quit the game. It could be boring for the winning player because they know that there is no way that they will lose at this point and it means that they don’t need to strategize any more. Although killers would find this really interesting in the short term they would quickly get bored with the game.

Conclusion

In conclusion the game of Ur is more for casual gamers but the changes I made to it may make the game appeal to hardcore players in some way. I tried to make a few changes to it and some of them I just kept as they were but some of them either weren’t worth using at all or just needed to be changed in some way to make the game balanced. One of the changes made the game more appealing for killers and achievers. I decided that there was no need to change the game in any way in order to make it more appealing for socialisers because it is already a social game in the fact that you have to play it with someone. While I can make some minor changes the game is already balanced and in order to make it current you just have to change the symbols and design to a more modern template.

Bibliography

Quote 1 (page 446 line 21, tools for creating dramatic game dynamics, k.saler)

I used the general ideas from all of these to make the changes.

Schell, J (2009) ‘In The Beginning, There Is The Game Designer’ The Art of Games Design: A Book of Lenses.  (Morgan Kuafmann)

Brenda Braithwaite & Ian Schreiber (2008) Challenges For Games Designers  'Games Design Atoms' (Charles River Media

Brenda Braithwaite & Ian Schreiber (2008) Challenges for Games Designers Charles River Media (chap 5 & 6)

Brenda Braithwaite & Ian Schreiber (2008) Challenges for Games Designers Charles River Media (chap 2) ‘Games Design Atoms’

M.Leblanc (2006) ‘Tools for Creating Dramatic Game Dynamics’ in K.Salen & E Z|immerman (eds) The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology (MIT: Cambridge

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