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Warfarm

Platform:
Board Game
Duration:
one and half month
Team Size:
3
Role:
Designer & Art 
Software:
Photoshop
Notion
Language:
English
Overview
Warfarm is a 3-player card & token based board game full of competitions, interactions, and political plays. Players need to manage their own lands in an appropriate way to achieve victory in a Middle-Age scene.
In each turn, players make choices on how to manage their resources (cards, tokens, and units) to gain more profits. There are 3 different branches of cards for players to play: Farming Cards that focus on developing economy; Military Cards that focus on conquering; and Religion Cards that focus on interfering with other players' development. Cards have different effects and levels, so players can unlock more powerful cards as the game goes. The final goal is to achieve any of the three winnings: Economy Victory, Military Victory, and Religion Victory.
Responsibilities
Some of my responsibilities include:​
  • Design the card system and token-based interaction system.
  • Design all Religion Cards and Resource Cards, some Farming Cards & some Military Cards.
  • Arrange playtests.
  • Design and iterate cards and economy systems. 
  • Set the art style and make arts for all Religion Cards & Resource Cards.
  • Print all game components.
Design Goal & Reflection
Goal: create a board game that inspires the players to spontaneously interact with others meaningfully and intensely.
Reflection: Warfarm does provide tons of interesting or even "political" interactions (such as two weak players counter one strong player together etc.) between players thanks to the three-player-balance design & card branches with distinct playstyles of the game.

Goal: create a simple & straightforward board game that is easy to learn.
Reflection: it is easy to learn and play Warfarm for the most players thanks to the simple build of units & straightforward gameplay (such as building a Soldier by combing a Farmer token with a Steal token).

Goal: create a board game that provides replaybility and different strategies for players.
Reflection: Warfarm's design that resources and improvements are rendered by shuffled cards adds tons of randomness and different strategies for players in each game.
Game Iteration & Design Process
At first, we aimed to design a game with these concepts: frequent player interactions, token-based with random resources, and the theme of starvation. Based on these concepts, we made our first prototype in which the players could build soldiers and farmers, soldiers could attack and drew cards by destroying other players' farmlands, and farmers could draw cards by farming.
However, all players drew cards from one same resource deck that only provided basic token resources, which did not offer players many meaningful strategies to choose from. Thus, we added "table cards" and "trap cards" in the second prototype and placed them in a different pile from the basic resource deck, so players had tons of new possibilities and strategies based on the cards & resources they got at first and the strategies their opponents used.
Nevertheless, even though players had different strategies, they still shared one same way of wining: destroying all others farmlands, which led to a fact that it was fun at the early stage of the game because players used different strategies to achieve their own advantages, but players' strategies converged at the late stage of the game. So we added different wining conditions into the game, more cards into the game, and categorized different cards into three levels based on how powerful they were. And in the final version, we achieved our goal of making an interesting board token-based game with frequent player interactions and many meaningful strategies for players to choose.
Download Warfarm Rulebook:
Warfarm-Rules.pdf
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