As part of the research in our Games for Learning Institute my colleague Jan Plass and I have been batting around ideas for making games that do a good job of keeping track of what’s going on inside the mind of the player. The general idea is that as we create learning games, we want to be able to know whether the player is actually “getting it”, or is just clicking around randomly.
To this end, we’re looking at games that ask the player to understand and apply some kind of rule. To get some practice in making these sorts of games, we borrowed ideas from the wonderful card game Set, and combined them with other games like Bejeweled, to create various games where the player needs to understand and apply a rule.
This week I threw together a rough prototype. Since it combines ideas from the games Set and Bejeweled, I call it “Beset”. The game is probably going to change and get refined a lot, but this preliminary sketch is what I have so far.
On the screen you see 81 cards. Any given card can have one, two or three symbols, three possible shapes, three possible colors, and three possible textures. So, just like in the game of Set, there are 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 = 81 unique cards. The basic idea of the game is that you need to pick three cards that match a rule that’s shown at the top of the screen.
This rule will say that all three cards need to have either the same or all different (1) number of symbols, (2) symbol shape, (3) symbol color, and (4) symbol texture. For each of these four properties, the rule will either say the three cards need to be all the same or all different.
Whenever you successfully apply the rule to match three cards, smiley faces appear over those three cards — and then the rule changes. The goal is to get smiley faces over all 81 cards.
Toward the end of the game, when there are only a few cards left in play, it’s possible to get stuck with cards that don’t match any rule. For that reason I added a “slide smiley face over” feature. You can always slide a smiley face one square up, down, left or right, to bring a card back into play.
I know it sounds a little complicated, but it all makes sense once you start playing. You can try it HERE.
I’d love to know what people think.
Hint: for the first round, try clicking on the three cards that have green striped ovals.
I’m a big fan of Set, and I love this game. Just a little bit hard to get the rules at first but a lot of fun after getting familiar with the symbols of the objective.
I have played set before, so the rules made sense immediately (I thought) but I was never able to get any smiley faces to show up. Then I remembered that in Bejeweled, they need to be a connected grouping (which isn’t stated explicitly in the post anywhere). After that I was able to find a few, but it was still challenging. I wouldn’t want to have to do it while a clock was counting down!
Thanks! I’ve added a hint at the end of the post, which should help to get people started.