Character Lesson with Justin 6/10

 In the first character lesson with Justin we talked broadly about games, types of games and how their mechanics make them playable, enjoyable and what games evoke what kind of experience. We established that board and card games which you play with real people are about entertainment, competition, the social aspect and in many cases about acquiring skills like logical thinking and applying certain rules to a situation to come out as the potential winner.
Video games on the other hand also offer entertainment and often competition, but along with wish fulfillment they are usually very immersive, they have a huge narrative and let the player create the world, build weapons etc. which is not possible in board games, but unless you play with another person sitting right next to you, the social aspect is much lower and often neither necessary nor desired.
 Our first task was to put a game into a different medium of what would usually be played in, for example a video game as a board or card game. I chose League of Legends, which is an online tower game and tried to transform it into a board game. The essence of the game is to fight alongside minions and gain control of the enemy base. There are two teams, red and blue so I decided that each player would have a set of minions, probably about 7 and starting in the middle, the players would roll a 6 sided dice and they'd be able to move one minion per round. The board three rings that have to be circled before the minions can start attacking the enemy base. Whenever there are two minions of different teams on one square, the players have to roll the dice and the minion with the higher number stays while the loser has to start again from the middle. Every minion that has gotten to the enemy turret takes one life point away from it per turn so from the original 20 (or any number) there will soon be no life points left and the team who's turret is still alive wins.
 League of Legends is a game very much built on luck as a lot depends on the all over skill of your team so I think replacing the other players abilities with a dice is an appropriate choice. Goal of the game is to move the right minion at the right time and sometimes provoke confrontation when necessary even when it's risky.
 The second task was to invent a game from the props of city of shadows which I found very difficult to do. We were given a big map like board which had about 30 (?) squares with names from locations in London so I came up with an app game in which a thief has stolen something of worth from Barnet (the first square) and the player has to complete puzzles or encrypt clues for every stop to try to catch the thief and if he wasn't fast enough, the thief would escape and the game would be lost.