Game Design Merit Badge in action!

Regular visitors to our site will know that our family is involved in scouting. Trevor, Jaden, and I (dad) are Eagle scouts and I’ve been involved as scoutmaster for a number of years. In addition to all the camps, we’ve also worked on plenty of merit badges.

And we’ll admit that some merit badges are more fun to work on than others.

But I don’t think I’ve anticipated working on a merit badge with as much enthusiasm as I have for the one we began tonight – Game Design!

Boy are these scouts in for a treat!

The Boy Scouts of America added the Game Design merit badge to the mix in March 2013. And I’ve been waiting for a chance to work on it with our scouts ever since.

As a troop, we have a regular cadence of working on certain merit badges to help the boys progress in their rank advancements. But we also make sure to schedule in merit badges that they have extra interest in. For some it’s Reading, for others it’s Photography.

And for others it’s Game Design!

All the boys in our troop know I love games. Our scout trailer has a couple chess sets always at the ready and I make sure to take along Hive on most campouts (even on our backpacking camp last weekend). And we’ve had an occasional fun party night at our house to celebrate special occasions.

But tonight was different.

The Beginning

Tonight I dove into details about the humongous range of types of games – showing them samples of most of the different types.

The toughest part was holding the energetic boys back from immediately diving into playing every game I showed.

“Patience my padawans…

Before you set off to dream up and plan out a game you’d like to design, you must first realize how infinite the great possibilities are.

Don’t think all board games are roll-and-move like Monopoly or video games are first-person shooters like Halo. Let me open your eyes to so much more.”

I then went through so many different types of games (each of which can be broken down even more):

• Cooperative games
• 2-Player games
• Worker placement games
• Hidden-movement games
• Party games
• Strategy games
• Abstract games
• Word games
• Trivia games
• Luck games
• Dice games
• Card games
• Guessing games
• Random games
• Reflex games
• Role playing games
• Miniature games
• Kids games
• Group games
• Sports games
• Recreational games
• and yes, even Video & Electronic games (with their wide ranges)

After which it was time to talk about themes…Oh, so many themes.

Let’s just say boys love games.

Their wide eyes and eager hands told the story – they’re excited too.

The Merit Badge
First of all, I have to say how excited I was to see modern board games well represented in the boy scout merit badge book. It has pictures of some of our favorite board games: Dominion, Settlers of Catan, Word on the Street, Pirate vs. Pirate, and Bubble Talk – and mentions many others: Pandemic, Carcassonne, and Ticket to Ride – as well as reference to my favorite video game Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

The Game Design merit badge has 8 main requirements, each of which is broken down into various subsets. The first few requirements are all about understanding different types of games (tonight), game design terms, intellectual property, and choosing a game they know and proposing changes.

The crux of the merit badge though is designing their own new game.

Requirement #5 is Design a new game using any medium they’d like. Each scout needs to keep a game design notebook where they will detail the elements of their game – medium, format, objectives, theme, story, play value, and rules.

They then develop a prototype of their game for requirement #6. They also play-test it and make design changes along the way as they repeat this process at least 3 times.

After all those play-tests, they then move on to a Blind Test of the game for requirement #7. The Blind test needs to be with players that haven’t been involved in any of the prior processes. It should be a great experience for the boys.

With 15 scouts in our troop, we’ve got a lot of playing to do. Bring it on!

The last requirement relates to careers – visiting with an individual in the game design industry. And for that, all the boys are super excited that the owner of Chair Entertainment (developers of the super popular Infinity Blade) lives in our neighborhood (he’s also the dad of one of our scouts).

Ready to Play

12 and 13 year old boys can only hold back for so long. Showing such a wide variety of games had them chomping at the bit by the time we got through various game design terms.

So we released the hounds and let them grab the games they were most interested in and set down to play. I had to flutter between tables as quickly as I could to give them the rules rundown of the games they’d chosen to play. But once they were off and rolling with their games, it was hard to call an end to the night.

Thus began our first night of the Game Design merit badge.

Their homework for next time – bring their game design journal and ideas of what they want to create.

I can hardly wait to see what they come up with.