Rules

High School

Rules:

To Start:

1. 1. Every player needs a sheet of paper and a pencil for a “Resume” 
   2. Something to mark the players on the board
   3. Two Dice

• DO NOT LOOK AT CARDS

Game Play:

1. 1. First everyone roles to find there GPA and SAT:
      1. To role for GPA you role both dice, you begin with a baseline of 2.8 and multiply your role by 0.1 and add that to the 2.8 (a 10 would be 2.8 + 0.1×10 = 3.8)
      2. SAT has a baseline of 1000 and you multiply 50 times the dice role and add it (a 10 would be 1000 + 50×10 = 1500)
      3. You write both your GPA and SAT on your resume
   2. After certain squares on the board there are circles, you stop at these circles no matter what your role is and re-role and continue on your next turn
   3. Role to see the number of spaces you move, if you land on a square write it down on your resume and do nothing until the end of the game unless stated below

• The only squares you do anything on in game are:

1. 1. 1. SAT and GPA
      2. Fail class, Senioritis, Get In a Fight:
         1. On these squares you immediately role, if you roll doubles or an odd number you get minus 1 full GPA point if not nothing happens
      3. How many apps: You simply roll both die and whatever you get is the number of schools you applied to, write it down

• Change GPA or SAT: You can choose to re-roll for your GPA and SAT if you land on these squares, this is done the same way as before

1. 1. Get in ED: Skip to the end

End of Game:

1. 1. Flip over cards corresponding to what you landed on, if you roll even it comes true if you roll odd it does not.
      1. These cards have points that can change your GPA, Happiness, and your “Application Score” tally these up they will all affect what school you go to

• Only when everyone is done with can you finally reveal the finish card, do as it says to find out your college

Authors Note

For my fourth and final artwork, I decided to recreate one of the most stressful experiences I have been through, and one that any college student can relate to…college applications. My board game which is simply called Senior Years does its best to depict the decisions, choices, and opportunities you have while in your Senior Year. A few of the squares you can land on are definitely far fetched, such as “Cure Cancer,” but these are just to add to the intentionally dramatic and infuriating ending. The game works by giving each player a resume. Throughout the game players will add things to their resumes like their GPAs, SAT scores, and potential extracurricular activities. What all of these are is completely decided by luck, you also may land on something and not end up getting it. There are both positive and negative things that can happen, you can become valedictorian or fail a class, in theory you could do both in the same game. At the end of the game you find out your “results” by adding up the scores measured based on your decisions. The methods of scoring are GPA, SAT, and arbitrary scoring methods called “Happiness Points” and “Application Points.” Some outcomes can have both negative and positive impacts for example if you go to a party your GPA may decrease but your happiness goes up. What players do not know while playing the game is that everything is entirely pointless.

I feel very fortunate to have gotten into Northeastern. While I had good grades, a very good ACT score, and fairly impressive extracurriculars (this is not me boasting just a reference) colleges often seem to just pick whomever they want sometimes at random. Some of my best friends back home who are much more impressive than me on paper never got into the schools they wanted. This is not to say they went to bad schools, just schools that were below their academic potential. While they all love their schools now, when decisions first came out so many people were upset over unexpected results. I wanted my game to mimic this. When you come to the end you find out it was all completely random and you have a process of rolling the dice to figure out where you end up. Obviously this is satirical and not how the admissions process works, but to a high school senior getting rejected from their dream school it seems that way.

While this was an experience project I used two main pieces of appropriation in my work. The first was a pizza box. My entire game was designed to be stored in and be made on a pizza box. This I stole from Allan Kaprow and one of our first lessons in a way. I wanted to make something out of a found object to add a little bit of creativity into it. The lesson I am referring to is the outdoor lesson we did where we made scores and games out of random objects people had brought. This was an aspect I had not yet incorporated into one of my artworks, and so I did. The other thing I appropriated was The Game of Life. This was less intentional. I wanted to make a board game, I decided that when I settled on using a found object to make the board. At the time I had a loose idea about wanting to make it about college applications but could not think of how to do that. I thought about various board games that I had played, and I eventually realized that the timeline way that The Game of Life is played would be perfect to portray applying to and hearing back from colleges. The board game aspect allowed me a little bit extra artistic license with the look which was mildly scary so I kept it simple enough to wear it looked nice, but did not do too much extra in fear of messing it up. Overall I am proud of the concept and production of my final artwork.