FlyingDonut
Mouseketeer
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2023
- Messages
- 190
TLDR: we made a scavenger hunt using WDW as the game board, and 8 adults had fun.
Last weekend my fiancée and I hosted a bachelorette party for her and friends at WDW. A large planned activity was a scavenger hunt around the Disney resorts, inspired by the Wendover Productions YouTube / Nebula Jet Lag series (mainly Season 10: Au$tralia, the first 90 seconds of this video explains the idea:
).
The overall idea of the game stayed pretty constant throughout development: we wanted teams to travel between Disney resorts using Disney transport (and walking) without having to go into parks. They do fun challenges to get money, and use that money to claim resorts as a scoring mechanism.
I’ll discuss rules and how we got to them below, but for anyone interested in seeing what we came up with, the rules are readable here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MqZjNV7Qqg_IzROkyYxHme7slkiciB-N/pub. (I'm referring to myself as "game control" in the rules for anonymity) If you choose to do something like this, know that we think this was fun, but not perfect. Take this as a resource, not law. The document includes the rules, but not the list of challenges since I think those are the most likely to be improved upon by others. I’m happy to discuss challenges in replies if anyone wants.
We quickly started with the structure of betting money on challenges at hotels (closely mirroring Jetlag). We also had (from Jetlag) the concept of “investing in” hotels from the beginning. We spent several weeks brainstorming challenges generally and worrying too much about the values of challenges (how many dollars do you get back for a bet?). As a one day game we split into three 2:15 rounds, with lunch between 1 and 2. At the end of each round, a few things reset (pins, challenges) and teams received a small amount of money (as a hedge in case they’d gone bankrupt). We also kept the Jetlag “welcome bonus” idea, which gave teams money for arriving at a hotel that hadn’t been visited before.
We considered multiple ways to incorporate pins into the game, including creating sets of characters, getting pins released in the same or different years, matching sets pins and are released in. This was a very difficult part of the game to test because we weren’t going to WDW, and so I couldn’t look at pin boards to get an idea of how difficult it would be for teams to create the right sets of pins. Pin collecting objectives also felt complicated, and not obvious to non-Disney folks. After several iterations, in the final week of creating the game, we landed on pins sharing colors as a simple way to make sets of pins. I wish it were more interesting, but it was easy to remember and trade pins.
We also struggled with what to do with pins once successfully traded into sets. Jetlag has “curses” and “powerups” for teams, which we considered from the beginning, but we didn’t have a great way to test these as being too powerful or boring. We also considered having pins be their own scoring mechanic worth the same as controlling resorts at the end of the game, but didn’t like taking the focus off resorts. We would eventually combine this with another concern, time spent on transportation.
Our last major concern was the potential boringness of transportation. We didn’t want our game to be magical-commute-simulator 4000. With about a week to go before the real game, we decided to give teams access to a “pin shop” to trade in their pins for “curses” or “boons” while on transportation. The hope was to give a strategic choice while waiting for your vehicle to get where it was going. Different items cost different numbers of pins (we gave teams 5, which they could trade) and could be used once per round. To nudge people from spending the ENTIRE game on transporation, we made teams pay game-money each time they used transportation (also something Jetlag does). We charged more for less fun (buses) vs more fun (monorail).
Finally, we wanted to make it feel more like the teams were competing against each other (they wouldn't see each other for most of the day). So we created "battles" which would be triggered by the pin shop. They were time-limited challenges that teams competed to do better at (e.g. take photos of as many worms as possible in the next 10 minutes). Unfortunately, they barely got used in the game at all so I won't go into them. For me, they're an example of the game having imperfect rules (they weren't strong enough), but I got away with it because teams were incentivized not to do underpowered things.
Our testing method was kind of fun in a nerdy way. We made a big spreadsheet of every hotel and randomly generated 3 “challenges” at each with payoffs of 125% - 300%, and success odds of 50-100%. We set time to complete challenges based on their payoffs. We then basically played a table top role playing game in 15 minute increments where we described traveling between hotels, doing challenges (letting random numbers determine success / fail) and claiming hotels. There were no pins in this simulation. For DVC resorts, we considered the whole resort one thing (e.g. AKV and AKL are one resort). Here’s what we learned:
Notes: right of the bat, team 1 had more money than expected from sim games. I had priced the Sebastian challenge in case it would take 20 minutes.
Team 2 had lunch at French Quarter
Team 1 controlled: GF, AoA (2)
Team 2 controlled: Contemporary, Poly (2)
Notes: Making French Quarter and Riverside different resorts for scoring purpose was a late decision we had made to make the Crescent Lake resorts a bit less powerful, and I’m glad we did it. Nobody would have gone if it were just one resort, but we liked the walkability and cooler than bus boat transportation with the other Springs area resorts, so I wanted to push players that way. The investment into AKL confused Team 1 when they were notified, even more so when I told them they did not get the resort welcome bonus. The existence of the pin shop item to remotely claim a resort was something I’d decided to include in the game, and intentionally not told fiancée. I’d expected to be too expensive in matching pins, so I’d show it to the teams and they’d save up in case they saw it again. Instead, Team 2 had the pins at the right time and were able to get probably the most powerful pin item of the game.
Team 2 controlled: AKL, Contemporary, POFQ, POR, Poly, SSR (6)
Notes: At this point, Team 1 had 3x the money of Team 2, but I was really happy it was tied! The game felt close and fun going into the last round.
Notes: The players were having fun doing challenges, and so did several at PO. However, they had more than $25k at this point, which was not something ANY of the sim games had contemplated. In the sim games, I’d been stingier with money challenges, some challenges had taken longer, and my investments in resorts had scaled. Had they stopped doing challenges (earning money they didn't need) they would have more comfortably claimed SSR, but they reported having fun doing the challenges.
Notes: The sim games didn’t account for the human factor of being done with the game, but how can I blame players who are on vacation for wanting to be done and eat pastries? It wasn’t even clear that Team 1 (who had overtime which team 2 didn’t know about) would be able to claim another resort after regular time. Our sim games made us think that Team 2 probably could have got on the Skyliner from RIV and claimed BC/YC, but it would have been close, and Team 2 did not know that they had enough money to claim from Team 1.
If there’s interest, I’ll do a follow-up post on how I felt about my game design decisions after seeing it played. Thank you for reading such a long post!
Last weekend my fiancée and I hosted a bachelorette party for her and friends at WDW. A large planned activity was a scavenger hunt around the Disney resorts, inspired by the Wendover Productions YouTube / Nebula Jet Lag series (mainly Season 10: Au$tralia, the first 90 seconds of this video explains the idea:
The overall idea of the game stayed pretty constant throughout development: we wanted teams to travel between Disney resorts using Disney transport (and walking) without having to go into parks. They do fun challenges to get money, and use that money to claim resorts as a scoring mechanism.
I’ll discuss rules and how we got to them below, but for anyone interested in seeing what we came up with, the rules are readable here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1MqZjNV7Qqg_IzROkyYxHme7slkiciB-N/pub. (I'm referring to myself as "game control" in the rules for anonymity) If you choose to do something like this, know that we think this was fun, but not perfect. Take this as a resource, not law. The document includes the rules, but not the list of challenges since I think those are the most likely to be improved upon by others. I’m happy to discuss challenges in replies if anyone wants.
Game Development / Creation
Principles and goals:
- FUN IS MOST IMPORTANT. I also wanted the game to be strategic, and close in terms of scoring, but not at the expense of fun.
- I wanted simple, easy to remember rules.
- I wanted the game to resemble that from the Jetlag series, both because we liked it, and because we thought using it as a guideline would keep our game more balanced.
- We wanted to keep spending of money low (~$20 / team)
- We wanted trading pins to be part of the game
Requirements / “knowns” going in
- 2 teams playing
- I would be back in the hotel room running the game, with some ability to tweak things live if they weren’t working
- Approximately 7 hours of game time
- Teams would have at least one “Disney person,” and at least one person new to WDW
- Everyone playing is a friend, and the game is being played in a friendly instead of hyper-competitive environment.
Questions I had going into the hunt were:
- Can challenges be fun and interesting at the same time?
- Can we plausibly make it feel like a team could be unsuccessful at a challenge?
- How do “non-Disney people” react to such a Disney-centric game?
- Can we make transportation fun?
How we made the game
Structuring activities / ruleset
My fiancée asked me to lead creation of the game, but was willing to be involved with any aspects I asked for help with. We didn’t want to give her team too much of an advantage by having someone who knew more about the rules or strategy. In the end, we had two other participating friends also helped brainstorm a little, so all teams would have someone who could have thought about the game for a few weeks, and I felt able to get more of fiancée’s help. I also intentionally kept many challenges from her.We quickly started with the structure of betting money on challenges at hotels (closely mirroring Jetlag). We also had (from Jetlag) the concept of “investing in” hotels from the beginning. We spent several weeks brainstorming challenges generally and worrying too much about the values of challenges (how many dollars do you get back for a bet?). As a one day game we split into three 2:15 rounds, with lunch between 1 and 2. At the end of each round, a few things reset (pins, challenges) and teams received a small amount of money (as a hedge in case they’d gone bankrupt). We also kept the Jetlag “welcome bonus” idea, which gave teams money for arriving at a hotel that hadn’t been visited before.
We considered multiple ways to incorporate pins into the game, including creating sets of characters, getting pins released in the same or different years, matching sets pins and are released in. This was a very difficult part of the game to test because we weren’t going to WDW, and so I couldn’t look at pin boards to get an idea of how difficult it would be for teams to create the right sets of pins. Pin collecting objectives also felt complicated, and not obvious to non-Disney folks. After several iterations, in the final week of creating the game, we landed on pins sharing colors as a simple way to make sets of pins. I wish it were more interesting, but it was easy to remember and trade pins.
We also struggled with what to do with pins once successfully traded into sets. Jetlag has “curses” and “powerups” for teams, which we considered from the beginning, but we didn’t have a great way to test these as being too powerful or boring. We also considered having pins be their own scoring mechanic worth the same as controlling resorts at the end of the game, but didn’t like taking the focus off resorts. We would eventually combine this with another concern, time spent on transportation.
Our last major concern was the potential boringness of transportation. We didn’t want our game to be magical-commute-simulator 4000. With about a week to go before the real game, we decided to give teams access to a “pin shop” to trade in their pins for “curses” or “boons” while on transportation. The hope was to give a strategic choice while waiting for your vehicle to get where it was going. Different items cost different numbers of pins (we gave teams 5, which they could trade) and could be used once per round. To nudge people from spending the ENTIRE game on transporation, we made teams pay game-money each time they used transportation (also something Jetlag does). We charged more for less fun (buses) vs more fun (monorail).
Finally, we wanted to make it feel more like the teams were competing against each other (they wouldn't see each other for most of the day). So we created "battles" which would be triggered by the pin shop. They were time-limited challenges that teams competed to do better at (e.g. take photos of as many worms as possible in the next 10 minutes). Unfortunately, they barely got used in the game at all so I won't go into them. For me, they're an example of the game having imperfect rules (they weren't strong enough), but I got away with it because teams were incentivized not to do underpowered things.
Balancing / tuning
I’ll start by noting that though we tried to balance the game, the game was not balanced. This wasn’t as bad as we thought it could have been because teams simply chose not to do things that weren’t powerful, but it did mean that some specific challenges, and game mechanics (the Battles) were under incentivized and hardly used.Our testing method was kind of fun in a nerdy way. We made a big spreadsheet of every hotel and randomly generated 3 “challenges” at each with payoffs of 125% - 300%, and success odds of 50-100%. We set time to complete challenges based on their payoffs. We then basically played a table top role playing game in 15 minute increments where we described traveling between hotels, doing challenges (letting random numbers determine success / fail) and claiming hotels. There were no pins in this simulation. For DVC resorts, we considered the whole resort one thing (e.g. AKV and AKL are one resort). Here’s what we learned:
- There’s not reason to go to the All Stars if they’re one resort, and they’re overpowered if they’re three (to easy to walk between them). They’re also tough to create challenges for.
- There’s no reason to go to AKL
- The Crescent Lake resorts and Skyliner are incredibly powerful because you can walk between them, and the Skyliner is frequently faster than buses.
- Going to the Crescent Lake resorts first or last is an interesting strategic choice – do you want the welcome bonuses, or the last shot to claim them all?
- It may seem (and even be) correct to bet all your money, but it feels REALLY bad to lose a 90% bet. It’s surprisingly possible to come back from losing all your money in the first 15 minutes of the game, but it still violates the STAY FUN rule.
- Strategically, you can pick a set of buses (like anything going to Crescent Lake, or any of SSR, OKW, POFQ) if you don’t care about your specific destination and wait less for a bus.
- We expect teams to visit 6-10 resorts
- Teams were going to spend a lot of time on buses
- Some transportation cost tuning stuff
- When you reveal information about challenge availability at resorts, and how much money is invested into a resort, matters a lot strategically.
- Time is as much, or even more, of a resource than money.
- What sub-optimal strategies, or traps would people try for
- How tired people would get
- How risky people would be (I was very risky while fiancée was not in testing)
- Anything about actually playtesting the challenges
How the game went!
This according to my notes. I was busy issuing challenges while taking them, so they may not be 100% perfect. I’m detailing challenges I thought were interesting, and the resort travel strategy. Teams did more challenges I’m not bothering to mention.Round 1 – team 1
We all started at GF, and Team 1 did a challenge there (go swimming) which was worth 2x since it had been designed to pull people back to GF, which was the only pool we had access to. So they started off doubling their money in about 20 minutes, and invested in GF after Team 2 had left. They walked from GF to MK and took a bus to AoA, because it was one of the first Skyliner resort buses to arrive. The issued a Battle challenge (the only one of the whole game) on their first bus, which was declined. They did some challenges at AoA, invested, and took the Skyliner to CB, where they took a “find Sebastian” challenge. Little did I know, there was a Sebastian on the front desk, so they got a 150% challenge in less than a minute. They then picked up the visit 3 beaches challenge. They finished the round with 1 beach visited and had lunch at CB.Notes: right of the bat, team 1 had more money than expected from sim games. I had priced the Sebastian challenge in case it would take 20 minutes.
Round 1 – team 2
Team 2 took a challenge from GF to visit 3 beaches, visited the GF beach, and took the monorail to Contemporary, claiming the welcome bonus. They visited Contemporary’s beach and got an early pin shop boon to be able to have two challenges at once. They bet their money not tied up in the beach bet in a (possibly too easy) challenge to get more than 12 stories tall, invested in Contemporary, and took the monorail again to Poly. This started a string of challenges where I told teams to find hammocks (which I’d though would be easy) but apparently they were put away across most of WDW due to rain the day before. They invested in Poly and finished Round 1 by walking to TTC to get an express monorail to Epcot and bus to Port Orleans.End of Round 1
Team 1 had lunch at CBTeam 2 had lunch at French Quarter
Team 1 controlled: GF, AoA (2)
Team 2 controlled: Contemporary, Poly (2)
Round 2 – team 1
Team 1 invested in CB and walked to RIV, which they claimed. They liked some RIV challenges, but didn’t want to give up on the beach challenge, so they took Skyliner to the International Gateway and got the last beach at BC, which they claimed. At this point, they had almost $6k less than half way through the game, about double what we’d seen in the sim games. They bet it all on another challenge that they were able to do quickly (“Are you my mommy?” – Find an artistic representation the parents of a character on one of your pins, or the child of a character on one of your pins. you may trade pins to make this happen.) They walked to and claimed BW, then Swan and Dolphin, where they did a few more challenges, claimed, and ended the round.Round 2 – team 2
Team 2 took a 7 minute penalty for being on a bus when lunch started. After finishing lunch at POFQ, they bet all their money on a lower paying “ride a boat” challenge to Riverside, where I asked them to lie in (another unavailable) hammock. They claimed both PO resorts and went to Disney Springs by boat. They went to and claimed OKW and SSR. They acquired a powerup to see the challenge board and how much opposing team had acquired at two resorts, and used it on CB and YC/BC, and got on a bus to CB from Springs. The round ended while they were travelling from SSR to CB. At some point in this round, Team 2 got a very powerful pin shop item – the ability to invest in one resort remotely. They correctly did this into AKL.Notes: Making French Quarter and Riverside different resorts for scoring purpose was a late decision we had made to make the Crescent Lake resorts a bit less powerful, and I’m glad we did it. Nobody would have gone if it were just one resort, but we liked the walkability and cooler than bus boat transportation with the other Springs area resorts, so I wanted to push players that way. The investment into AKL confused Team 1 when they were notified, even more so when I told them they did not get the resort welcome bonus. The existence of the pin shop item to remotely claim a resort was something I’d decided to include in the game, and intentionally not told fiancée. I’d expected to be too expensive in matching pins, so I’d show it to the teams and they’d save up in case they saw it again. Instead, Team 2 had the pins at the right time and were able to get probably the most powerful pin item of the game.
End of Round 2:
Team 1 controlled: AoA, BW, CB, GF, RIV, YC/BC (6)Team 2 controlled: AKL, Contemporary, POFQ, POR, Poly, SSR (6)
Notes: At this point, Team 1 had 3x the money of Team 2, but I was really happy it was tied! The game felt close and fun going into the last round.
Round 3- Team 1
Team 1 got a pin powerup to extend their Round 3 by 15 minutes. They took the friendship boat from Swan to Studios and a bussed to POFQ, which they claimed along with Riverside (taking both from Team 2.) They did a number of challenges before boating to Springs and then walking to SSR. During their 15 minutes of extended time they claimed SSR with about two minutes to spare, which secured the victory.Notes: The players were having fun doing challenges, and so did several at PO. However, they had more than $25k at this point, which was not something ANY of the sim games had contemplated. In the sim games, I’d been stingier with money challenges, some challenges had taken longer, and my investments in resorts had scaled. Had they stopped doing challenges (earning money they didn't need) they would have more comfortably claimed SSR, but they reported having fun doing the challenges.
Round 3- Team 2
On the bus to CB, Team 2 completed one of my personal favorite challenges (“Make Magic” – give a pin to a kid. You lose this challenge if you get a dirty look from any parents) while on the bus. They took CB from Team 1 (the game’s first capture!) by $1. They took the Skyliner to RIV and claimed it. With 15 minutes left and at RIV, the game was tied, and they decided to stop and enjoy the pastries in the RIV lobby.Notes: The sim games didn’t account for the human factor of being done with the game, but how can I blame players who are on vacation for wanting to be done and eat pastries? It wasn’t even clear that Team 1 (who had overtime which team 2 didn’t know about) would be able to claim another resort after regular time. Our sim games made us think that Team 2 probably could have got on the Skyliner from RIV and claimed BC/YC, but it would have been close, and Team 2 did not know that they had enough money to claim from Team 1.
End of game:
Team 1 won 8-6 after claiming SSR from Team 2 with minutes left in the game! Team 1’s victory came about because of a powerup they’d bought and was only by 2 minutes. I made a plan on the fly to have a hidden mickey finding tie breaker in the GF lobby if it came to it. Both teams made it back to GF via cheaper-than-minnie-van Lyfts (resort-resort) and we had dinner. Everyone seemed happy with the game!If there’s interest, I’ll do a follow-up post on how I felt about my game design decisions after seeing it played. Thank you for reading such a long post!
