Week of Design. Day 1: "Let me change this"

I begin this one-week journey of designing one print and play a day. Why? Why not?

I have no project up until next month, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to keep sharpening my game design abilities.

As soon as I told Juana, the other half of Raviol games, he said “Okay, the theme is ‘Let me change this’ ”

So yeah. “Let me change this” is the theme of this mini-jam.

My first idea was a hidden objective/hidden role game with open card drafting where players that don’t trust the active player can change the available pool of cards to avoid their victory.

I thought about a political game similar to Secret Hitler where you are kind of forced to pass fascist laws, but after an hour of tinkering, it became tedious. I’m gonna shelve that idea for later.

I really like meeples and dice, but I don’t want to overuse both of my favorite components on the first day, so let’s stay with cards for today.

I went with cards. Just cards. 18 cards, as I usually enjoy designing little games. I thought about an abstract game for 2 players where they organize colors in a grid. You can either change the order of your cards to match your hidden objective or change cards with the opponent. To make it more thematic I borrowed inspiration from one of my favorite games: Coloretto. So you have to organize Axolotls inside a fish tank. “Axolotl”, the first game, is the result of that idea.