I am a student working on a class project. We are developing a board game, and this is what we have so far (see attached pdf). Basically, we need help figuring out the flaws in the game. We've tested it briefly and it seems to work, but there are too many pieces needed. We wanted to keep it as simple as possible, and as quick as possible. We want a game that can be completed in a few minutes max.
We have no experience with game mechanic design, and are not board gamers ourselves, though some of us do play video games.
Basically it is similar to the game of life, I suppose, based on cellular automata, with competing rabbit breeds trying to cause other rabbits to overpopulate. I think we are going to use a hex grid instead of an irregular pentagonal grid like on the pdf file to simplify the creation of board and pieces.
There seems to be some inconsistencies in theme, that we can't quite put our fingers on.
Any suggestions or help with smoothing out the rules and figuring out a way to limit the number of pieces on the board are very welcome.
There is no chain reaction, the rabbits only cause reproduction once. Of course they can be forced to reproduce multiple times.
What I mean by too many pieces, is that inevitably the board will be covered with hexagonal tiles. We am trying to limit this somehow. This would not be a problem on the computer obviously but for a board game it becomes a problem, especially if it's played as a drinking game. (hey, we're in college)
We are thinking perhaps of adding some complexity with predator cards or tiles that can remove tiles from the board.
The way we are testing it is just with colored markers on a hex-tiled piece of paper.