BOOKED! - RACHEL BOULAY

— ROLE

Designer

— DATE

December 2022 – Present

— TEAMMATES

Marjolaine Roy

Marianne Prud'homme

BOOKED! is a set-collecting and area majority board game. With the players acting as ghosts haunting a hotel, they must make a trail of ectoplasm to navigate from one room to the next. By sacrificing booples to the Lord of Hell and possessing the most people, become the mightiest ghost within the hotel’s halls!

This project was designed alongside two other teammates for our board game design class at UQAT. We all worked together equally from the ideation to the execution, creating a fun and balanced game. I crafted the board and materials to create a sturdy prototype to playtest on.

Following great feedback from playtesters, we are currently working on making a version to send to publishers with the help of someone in the industry.

DYNAMIC GAMEPLAY

One of the main points we wanted to focus on for our game was making games vary at every play session. To do this, we’ve implemented map modifiers that change what rooms are accessible as you play.

The bellboy is a pawn a player can choose to use strategically as it prevents players from placing booples in the rooms on the same floor as the bell boy. By sacrificing 3 booples to the satanic circle, a player can move him around, blocking other rooms for players, or granting access to themselves that were not previously accessible.

Another instance of dynamic gameplay is the ghost hunter. After every night, cards are flipped to see which rooms the ghost hunter will place sage in. Ghosts, fearing sage, will be unable to access those rooms for the rest of the game. This forces players to adapt their routes every game as the rooms are never the same.

ALL HAIL SATAN

The satanic serves not only as a cool themed way to decide player order, but also to limit player wait times.

We noticed two major problems during our initial playtests.

First, as players play all their booples one after the other, players who would play first would have a lot of dead time waiting for others to place their booples.

Second, players who would play early in the night would sometimes find themselves seeing all their booples off the map, useless and powerless. Since you cannot put any booples on the map after your turn, people would get frustrated when they found themselves being the target of another player who followed suit.

Since we were already doing a game of majority on the board, then why not incentivize players to get some items in the circle with their fallen booples? And thus came the betting system. With collectibles on the sacrificial circle, players now had the opportunity to use the booples the current player booted on that turn and bet to get a tile they wanted.

Thus, players now had something to look forward to even if it isn’t their turn, and players feel less powerless when they get kicked out of a room.