Nail Climbing

In our STEAM course “Game Changers” we just finished our only AP for the term. We learned about the different types of games, and we learned what kind of mechanics are in games. During this term, we playtested a lot of fun (and some boring) games. Some of the games that we played that I enjoyed were Egyptian Ratscrew and Mancala. For our AP we had to go in a group and build our own game. My group members were RP, and DRS. We build a game called Nail Climbing. In this game, you are a rock climber who has to climb up nails and go around obstacles. Whoever gets to the top of the mountain first wins. This game is a game of skill, luck, and betrayal. I really enjoyed making this game with my group. I would have preferred to make the game board smaller because it would be easier to make more and to carry around or put in a box.

The game was created by many versions. Our first version was a foam board with ripped pieces of paper for cards. In all, our game went through 2 versions for the board and 3 for the cards in order for it to get what it is right now for our final version. We had a lot of people playtest our game. One of the reasons why our game is the way it is, because of the corrections people had for us. Some things did not change at the beginning we had nails in our board and we still have this now for our final version. In our second version for the board, we wanted to make sure the nails would stay nailed into the board because with our first version they kept on falling off. We then decided to get wood and make that our board. For the character pieces for the first version, we just put a sticker on the back and poked a hole in it so that it can stay on the nail. Now for our final version, we drilled a hole in it and put an eyelet in it. The whole board has 500 nails put in it. We wanted to use more because we thought that our first board had too many blank spaces in it. Our first version had around 300. Overall I think that every version we made and new things we added or took away for our game made it better.

I really enjoyed putting together this game with my group. My biggest contribution was helping with thinking part of the idea of what the game will be. I also nailed in the 500 nails for the wooden board; in total that took around 3 hours to put all 500 nails in that wooden board. I also created and partly designed the cards that were used for our game. For our cards, we made a back it is a drawing of a white mountain. What I am most proud of is creating the back for our cards. I am proud that I created that because it took forever and I think it looks cool and it fist just right with our game. It took a while to create but it was worth it. What I could have improved on more are the character pieces. They are a little bland but they are still an important piece in our game. In all, I think that our game wrapped up pretty well. Our group worked really well together because we enjoyed each other’s company and worked equally on the work for the game. I really helped the group focus on the task at hand, and that really helped in the long run. That everyone had a part in our group for doing different tasks. I mostly did tasks that were at my skill level. In all, we all worked on the game equally and I had fun building and designing the game with my group.