Prima Foosiripong
y_Our Mom
Your mom is dying, and you want her house. You must compete by bootlicking your mom to get your name in the will.
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Number of players: 2 - 4
Average Playtime: 10 minutes
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Tools: Tabletop Simulator, Microsoft PowerPoint, Figma, Microsoft Excel
Theme Inspiration
I watched the movie ​‘How to Get Millions Before Your Grandma Dies’.
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Which is about a grandchild who offers to take care of his grandma, not out of pure goodness of his heart, but hoping for an inheritance. In that moment, I thought to myself.
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‘Hey, this is a great theme for a board game!’
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Overview
3 Design Pillars
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Be the one who gets the inheritance by competing to gain your mother’s favor over your sibling.
Fate Can't Be Predicted
Only for the Inheritance
Simple
Gameplay
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2
3
Let's Break Them Down
Simple Gameplay
I want the actions to be so simple that players can focus entirely on making the strategic decisions their current situation demands.
Supporting Mechanic
Simple Core Loop
The whole gameplay is simple; all the player needs to do in this game is
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work for money
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Go back home to use said money to pamper the mother
Simple Actions
In each turn, player can choose to do 1 from 3 action
Work
Take Care of Mother
Move
Work for money
Use money to buy present for mother, make mother love, trust, or proud of you
You can move between Home and Workplace.
Easy-to-understand score counting
Count the points for every token you own, 1 point per token
The player who has the most of each type of token receives a +5 point bonus.
The Winner
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The player with the most points combined wins.
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If tied, the player who has more coins wins
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If still tied, the mother donates the inheritance to charity; no one wins.
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Only for the Inheritance
I want to portray to the player that, in this game, taking care of the mother is not from the goodness of the heart. But from the greed of getting the inheritance instead by using mechanics instead of plain writing.
Supporting Mechanic
Mother card
All the acts and objects in the mother card are not about spending quality time together with the mother, but rather giving her generic material things instead.
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The siblings never really know their mother, and prefer to use their money to solve problems rather than getting to know her.
Fate Can't Be Predicted
I want to add uncertainty to my game for both replayability and engagement, and what better way to do so in this theme than playing with the frail health of the mother and the cruelty of fate?
Supporting Mechanic
The Death Card
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The Death Card is among the mother cards deck; if it is drawn, the game instantly ends.
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In the setup phase, the player is required to separate the death card and divide the rest of the cards into 2 decks, add the death card to a deck, shuffle it, and put the other deck on top.
This act is to make sure the death is unpredictable while still ensuring that the player won’t face it early game.
Condition cards
Condition card is among the mother cards deck; if it is drawn, the game would be affected by its passive until the rest of the game.
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It corresponds with the mother's frail health.
Rulesbook
Combine everything and then we get this!
Retrospective
Scope and Priority
I have been introduced to the sprint method for this project, using a bi-weekly sprint to set the scope and priority is really helpful for me to decide what is the most important thing to do and what could be cut due to my current capability. It also guides me to understand the timeline better.
Design pillars
Even in the limited time, I believe that all the mechanics that I prioritize to develop support my 3 design pillars well and give the player the intended experience.
Lesson
Even though this tends to be a light-hearted game, I would like it to have the key takeaway as to why what the player is doing is wrong. This game encourages players to do exactly the opposite. Next time, I would add this to the game pillar to enhance it.