Image of the game set up before playing with all the materials
Critter Bidder
Game Description
“Critter Bidder” is a chaotic bidding style game where players take on the roll of 8 different animals which are connect to a specific color. Each player will then try to collect 9 total cards with the same color as their animal. Players will have to trade with other players by saying how many cards they want to trade. The game has no rounds and anyone can go whenever they want. There is a phase system where every minute a new restriction is added onto the players.
Time Duration: November 2022 - December 2022
Role: Lead Game Designer and Game Producer
Platform: Table-Top
Check out the official rule book!
Responsibilities + Accomplishments
For this project, I took on the role of lead game designer and game producer which meant I was in charge of creating a lot of the mechanic and initial ideas. I worked closely with my team to make sure our mechanics were fun and intuitive while also gave the players some sort of challenge.
I ended up focusing on the phase system, rules of the game, and set up of the game, as well as the game aesthetics.
As my final project for the semester, our game was awarded with lots of phrase from both peers and superiors even with a spot to officially publish our game if we so choosed.
Image of a finished game. The ended should be very chaotic with lots of cards spread about.
Design Process
For this project, it was originally a completely different game from the final project. The game was originally a futuristic cyberpunk choose your own story. The reason these games are so different from each other is we found out that the original idea was way to grand of a scale for our month time limit. So even though we had to pivot ideas half way towards our deadline, we decided to switch game ideas.
I decided to step up as game producer and lead game designer after I came up with the idea of creating a bidding style game with animals. I was originally inspired by card collecting games such as Pokémon and wanted to make a game like that without a focus on battle. I wanted it to call back to when kids would trade and freak out over trading cards at recess.
I also wanted to design the game to be rather flexible with how many players can play without the game feeling boring while also causing the players to do more interesting moves then the same ones over and over. (Like trading cards with same person over and over.) That is why I created the phases system that would create restrictions on the players as well as help them if the game was taking too long. This was met with very welcoming feedback with our play testers really enjoying the system.
Image of a standard deck that a player would have
Image of a game in progress