Dramaturgia

Team Size: 4

Allocated Time: 1 Week

Blurb:

The year is 1796. Within the dimly lit, smoky atmosphere of an English playwriting saloon, four aspiring playwrights gather, driven by a common goal: to craft the most captivating tale in recent memory. This is Dramaturgia—a storytelling game of creativity, interpretation, and quick wit, best played in the cozy ambiance of a coffee shop.

Goals:

• To create a storytelling social game
• Players should be given a series of constraints to tell a story.

Responsibilities: 

• Primary:
  • Gameplay mechanics and system
  • Rule writing
• Secondary:
  • Prototyping

Overall evaluation:

Storytelling mechanic:

After playing a variety of mind-reading games, we really enjoyed when creativity was a core aspect of the game. Therefore, we came up with the idea of having players create stories based on a series of constraints, and for other players to guess and come to understand each other’s style of stories. The original background we came up with for the game was a playwriting saloon set in the 18^th century, where players would, based on a given title, give out a set of clues for players to guess a story from. But, after playtesting, the given titles were not very intuitive or interesting, thus they were removed, and turned into more vague yet specific clues for players to interpret, which worked much better comparatively.

Coffee points system:

With the coffee shop as our setting, we really liked the idea of using coffee cups as part of the gameplay, where players would gain scores in the form of coffee, which they can spend by “drinking” it, to gain some form of advantage. However, we couldn’t figure out what was a suitable advantage to drinking coffee that could be both mechanically and thematically relevant, so coffee cups were changed to act solely as point counters.

Materials:

Due to the coffee shop setting, where tables are often small and cramped, we didn’t want to overwhelm players with a plethora of materials. At the beginning, our game mainly used cards, of which there was a huge quantity. We wanted to move away from cards, and eventually settled on a set of materials that were comparatively more organized. While the list of materials may seem to be large in quantity, when everything is laid out, it isn’t overwhelming which is what we were after.