Come one, come all! The space rush is heating up and these planets won't sell themselves!
Overview
Planet Peddlers is a competitive party game about pitching a planets to a prospective buyer. Players use a hand of various planetary features (plants, animals, environmental structures, and natural materials) and attempt to barter why their planet is right for the buyer. The buyer uses personality cards to help dictate who they are and what they are looking for in a planet.
Narrative
This was started during a class focusing on Science Fiction (Sci-Fi) concepts within media and seeing how those are translated into games with one of the exercises being producing our own game prototypes around concepts.
Planet Peddlers, though lighthearted by design, focused on consolidating aspects of both sci-fi as a genre and require players think of creative ways of pitch or retort to various possible subjects like dangerous environments, unusual native creatures, or ominous civilization. This, paired with the prompts the Buyer player have to change how they take stances as they varied from date locations and animal reserves to sacrificial planets or For example:
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Trying to explain how whispering giant stone obelisks make your planet on desirable for a child's birthday.
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Carefully wording why a peaceful civilization of tree aliens deserves to be blown up for TV content.
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Explaining how the hordes of faceless, pale predators would I'm your planned giant party.
My approach for for this was to create 3 genre to start with that would provide fertile ground of concepts:
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Normal: Normal cards were more scientific or slightly fantastical: gaseous planets and ship graveyards along with sky rivers and nanobot pools. This let me explore more traditional sci-fi tropes that weren't inherently good or bad.
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Scary: Scary cards were my attempt to explore more unsettling aspects of sci-fi. Which was kind of difficult as most normal tropes are usually just scary by themselves. So for this section, I leaned more heavily toward a fantasy side of things: abandoned superstructures, unnatural plants, and minerals with unnatural effects.
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Glucose: Glucose cards were half funny, half horror: sci-fi fantasy themed around sweets. Ice cream glaciers, sapient taffy, predatory berries, and naturally occurring caramel. The intent was to take a silly concept, as sci-fi often does, and explore it further with more content.
Design
It started as a college project and has largely remained the same at its core: a party, pitching game. The main design work went into creating thematic cards and working on descriptions that worked well enough to give a clear picture of what it was that I was describing. However, over the course of this playtesting I ran into 2 issues that I found solutions for:
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Players who valued the fun of winning over the fun of creative pitching could metagame their choices as a strategy which works against the creativity aspect of the game.
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No matter what I wrote, it was still difficult to get across my concepts since many of them were "alien" or fictitious objects.
Fair Trade Clause
During my playtesting, a point was raised that I hadn't considered as it's counter to the spirit of the game and how most users played: "If I see that my opponent will win, under no circumstance will I choose their cards."
While this metaplaystyle is: valid, would extend how long the game lasts, and allow the user to possible gain more points, it's very much against the spirit of a social experience game like this. However, to address this I created the Fair Trade Clause for use in game:
All players are given 15 coins with identical backs: 1o blank coins and 5 with Planet Peddler icons. When a Buyer is making a selection, they pass out 3 face down: the icon coin goes to the player whom they are giving the point to while the blank coins go to the others. All players keep these coins face down until all coins have been used. At this point, players flip over their coins to see how many points they've collected.
This decision uses the anonymity that other such games like Cards Against Humanity where point allocation are obfuscated until a point of no return where this metagaming tactics becomes far less useful, therefore keeping the focus on the card pitching over the points of each player.
Changes in Artwork
Art isn't my focus, but over the course of refining the design it became apparent that it would be very necessary in order both reduce the amount of text on every card but also create better mental images of these somewhat outlandish items and creatures. I began making artwork for these cards which helped free up available text but also gave far more insight into the nature of the cards.
For example: we have the Drip Vine here. I tried to use words to create an effective mental image but describing a weird alien slime plant isn't that easy. However using art freed me from having to visual describing it and focus on the more interesting parts of it's function.
