Pushing Forward

During class on Wednesday we discussed some of the problems we had with our core concept of building a “meal” of an appetizer, salad, main, dessert and drink. We concluded that as it stood the concept was lacking as there was no real strategy a player could take if the only goal was “build a meal” and “get bonus points if it is ethnic(which is an attribute of each dish)”. After some confusion on what each of us actually wanted the game to do we were able to finally able to come up with a solution to the too simple and too tactical problem. We came up with the idea of “order” cards which would represent a customer's order to each “chef”. The theme was coming together, each player as a chef that had an order to fulfill by building a meal of 5 courses with different dishes.

We also decided how each chef would build their pantry of dishes to build their meals with. There were three “shelves”; one shelf with appetizers and salads, one shelf with main dishes, and one shelf with deserts and drinks. The other way to build a pantry is by using the the refrigerator. We also decided we would have cards called “Meal Sabotages” that would start in the Refridgerator along side Spoiled food. Spoiled food would be worth less when put back into the refrigerator and Meal Sabotages would let a chef directly affect another chef or their meal. By the time class was over we had a better idea of the direction we were headed.

We met at the Douglass Campus Center to complete our prototype deck. We templated out the dishes first, deciding on 6 ethnicities, and also deciding that each ethnicity would have 7 dishes. We also looked up actual dishes from those ethnicities to use for the cards. We then assigned some dishes in each ethnicity special powers when they were added to your meal. This gave advantages and disadvantages to each dish. Once the dishes were done we finishes the order cards and meal sabotage cards. Our prototype deck was done and we all split for the night. I volunteered to take the deck to play through during a study break. After a quick run through it worked, although not optimally. We look forward to playtesting so that changes can be made to make Epic Meal even better. 

Ian Berman