Block Party
Board game | Game Design | Ann Arbor, Michigan | 2022
Design, 3D printing, graphic design, community outreach, and game mechanics of a board game.
Even in longstanding community engagement avenues such as town halls, members of the community struggle to have their voices heard, as architects and urban planners use extensive jargon and language that excludes those that don’t already grasp the industry. Our game design, named “Block Party,” is a preamble to this town hall scenario.
While we understand that there are complex layers to this systematic issue, layers that could not be solved with an implication of a simple board game, we hope that this game could still be used and benefit communities, as both a tool to learn about how to speak up and have a voice in the development process, through fun and conversation.
The level of completion that we hoped to achieve with our game design was a prototype of the pieces, cards, and instructions, enough so that the game could be played out amongst our peers as a trial run before it was ever brought to the community development level. In the final production, all pieces were able to be prototyped, including a game board design. The only element that was not included in this stage would be the game-specific dice. For testing purposes, we decided to use a standard die, but after testing the game, and discussions in class, the creation of a game-specific die would benefit the flow of the game immensely.
Designed in collaboration with Jordan Zauel and Morgan Davis.
