Media Type: Game
Platform: Board
Released: March 2019
Made for: COMM 351: Game Studies & Design @ UW-Whitewater
Created with: Google Docs, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Written in: English
Developers: Cass Aleatory, Chris Cawkins, Ben Lemkuil, and Ben Lueck
Cliffhanger is a competitive board game about climbing a mountain. Your goal is to be the last player remaining on the mountain. When you roll the die, you can move any player; it's up to you to decide if you want to try to push your opponents off the mountain or climb higher up it yourself. But be careful! Certain board spaces have various effects that might help or hinder players who land on them.
Working on Cliffhanger was an exceedingly valuable practicum in game design for me. It was my first chance to work on a collaborative project as a mechanic designer, and it was also the first board game that I created. I was honestly amazed at how well the Cliffhanger team was able to work together to distill the ideas of four separate people down into a game that's not only cohesive, but elegant in its simplicity. Even though Cliffhanger isn't a narrative-based game, I elected to include it here because this sort of design is an aspirational example for the story games I create; elegant, simple mechanics like Cliffhanger's are superb at complementing stories without overriding them.
I came up with the initial concept for a circular game board (though it's changed and grown a lot due to all my teammates' ideation), designed one type of space, wrote and edited the instructions sheet, and helped lead playtesting sessions. The rest of the work was executed by my co-developers.