MMXX
a collaborative tabletop card game
The Context
I underwent a mentorship with Erik Fleuter, senior UX designer at Harebrained Schemes. The objective was to go through the game design process, from ideation to MVP.
I love playing card and board games with my friends, and since the COVID pandemic forced us apart, I wanted to make something to celebrate on the other side.
I’ve enjoyed a lot of twenty minute card games like Exploding Kittens and Sushi Go!, and decided my design should offer a similar, accessible experience.
I spoke with everyone I could to find out what they liked and what they didn’t about these kinds of games in order to shape my design pillars. This user-centered approach led to these tenets:
The game needs to be accessible and enjoyable to tabletop noobs and veterans alike
The game needs to be an interactive, engaging, social experience
The game needs to have enough depth for creative play and strategizing
The Process
The first version involved a game board and early testing revealed that the board and mechanics were too cumbersome and not in line with the design pillars.
People tended to like the cards, so I leaned into them.
Originally inspired by the pandemic, I rebranded the concept to MMXX (the Roman numeral for 2020) and examined the overall events of the year through a lens of absurdism. This felt like the right move, and playtests later confirmed people didn’t want to be thinking about a virus any more.
The cards were the most compelling part of the beginning iterations, so eventually the design was pared down to cards and dice.
The Result
The reimagined design is a collaborative card game that challenges players to overcome crises in order to survive the year.
I went through more blank playing cards than my wallet would have preferred, and resorted to mailing out decks of the game to orchestrate playtests over Zoom.
After several sessions of tests, SWOT analyses on those sessions, and iterative balance passes, I finally secured the general gameplay loop and arrived at a minimum viable product.
These are the crisis cards (sans art). Players have to play numbers of the corresponding color type against a crisis, and combine those numbers with the result of a dice roll, to overcome the crisis. E.g.: if the crisis is a 21, players’ card contributions and dice total must be 22 or higher to succeed.
The Reflection
Making games is hard. I was happy as a clam engaging my UX skills, approaching the project through a design thinking framework, empathizing with my users to find out what they think is fun, to render a delightful design.
When I started designing the game, I leaned heavily on my personal gaming experience, but I promptly discovered that there is a whole other aspect to game design: game design.
Different iterations of the game were way too easy, or impossible to overcome. To keep players from mathematically solving the game, I introduced dice rolling as a key mechanic. I started with a d20 (a twenty-sided die) and tests revealed the d20 was too “swingy".
As a senior designer at a game company, Erik’s guidance and mentorship was invaluable through all aspects of my design, but especially during the balance passes. It took a lot of math, a lot of tests, and a lot of trial-and-error, but by the year’s end I had a feature-complete, working game.
I am currently designing the first expansion to MMXX, which will add additional mechanics to address player feedback and explore a few ideas I didn’t have time to develop during the “vanilla” development.
I commissioned a friend and colleague Seoul Lee for high fidelity, print-ready art assets, and his aesthetic choices absolutely captured the absurd humor I tried to inject into the MMXX.
