Wasteland

Waste Land is a trading and area-control board game. Players aim to grow their energy empire every turn by trading properties, facilities and money with other players to reach their goals. Every action also manipulates a global pool of waste that everyone needs to manage collectively to avoid an all-encompassing ecological collapse, bringing into the game an aspect of shifting loyalties. Player with most money at the end of 6 rounds wins.

↑ Playtesting an early prototype.

Contributions

For this proof of concept game I:

  • Formulated a high-level design vision based on the aims and hypotheses of my thesis, which this game was a part of
  • Researched energy and geopolitics and extracted interesting aspects to formulate into game prototypes
  • Prototypes various resolutions of real-world energy systems to find a compromise between an engaging game and an accurate-enough representation of the system
  • Balanced gameplay mechanics in spreadsheets
  • Utilised Tabletop Simulator for remote testing

Design Highlights

Infra Tiles

↑ The infrastructure cards. These cards made the decision on where to build extremely important, as you as a player wanted to build an effective energy empire while simultaneously thwarting others. Cascading effects might surprise unprepared players quickly.

The Final Game Board

↑ I wanted the game board to represent the real world, as I noticed that eariler, abstracted versions of the board made players more ruthless, than in this version where the actual planet was represented.

Further reading