Cardboard Creatures
My Little Cardboard Creature is a 4-8 player game about crafting, role-playing, and committing to the bit. First, build your own creatures out of cardboard and any other material at hand. Then, enter them in a challenge-based pageant where they will be judged on beauty, wit, grace, physical prowess, and intelligence. Finally, the creature who received the most medals is crowned as the winner of the pageant!
I worked on this game with a wonderful team for our Game Design 1 final project. Our initial intention with My Little Cardboard Creature was to build something. The idea began as a castle, but morphed into something more humble and moldable by players; a creature made of cardboard. Relatively early on in our brainstorming process, we developed the concept that we wanted to make a game where all you needed to play were the rules and a few household items, like cardboard. The idea of making creatures first occurred to us while playing a round of A Fake Artist Goes to New York, but with cardboard. From there we devised a round of timed building and swapping, that would result in each player having a creature of their own.
The concept of making these communally made creatures fight was discussed early on, but we needed more structure than that. Soon, an olympic level competition became our narrative frame, where contestants would be interviewed, and then partake in physical challenges, like a strength test, where they would be thrown against the wall, or a race, where players would throw their creatures as far as they could. Creatures would win medals (in the form of stickers) for winning these tasks, and the one with the most medals at the end would win. Then at the end, we forced players to destroy their creatures. Through playtesting, we found that this story did not quite feel rich enough, and the story of a beauty pageant emerged. This story felt like more evocative ground for roleplaying, and allowed us to name phases things like Meet the Contestants!, Talent Showcase!, and Backstage Drama!.
Throughout this process, we did a total of 15 playtests. Each of these taught us something new about the thing that we had created, and how people interacted with it. One aspect that changed throughout the process was this concept of facilitation. This game has timers and a need for tiebreakers, so who will be doing this? At one point, the concept of building an app or making a video was floated, but that felt disjointed with the DIY crafty energy of the project. We decided that we would write the rules with the assumption that someone would be playing the role of The Host. We tried our best to make this role not just seem like a responsibility, but a way to shape the game. However, we created the option for players to collaboratively share this role by blindly picking from the decks of cards if they’ve played before and understand the structure. Ultimately, we created an accessible and silly game that invites people to laugh and connect to each other.