Introduction

Many strategy or building games exist on the market that have a nation or civilization aspect to them, where you maintain a country and expand its influence. Most of these are typically war-oriented or resource management games, or both. For example, Civilization is a series of games that involve exploiting the resources in your surroundings and conquering other nations.

Thus I set out to make a game about building a country but have its focus not be war. I tried to design a game that had more of a focus on the player’s relationship with the environment and also the player’s relationship with their own nation. This is to oppose the mindset that most games create: that the environment is simply something that exists to be exploited, and that the nation is something that only functions to serve the player. Through my game’s design that fosters environmental care, these ideas are challenged.

The result is Countryworks, a (relatively simple) environmentally oriented country builder.

Aesthetics

I wanted to have a pixelated isometric style similar to Habbo Hotel. It was also supposed to evoke Minecraft.

In the top left corner there is a country customizer where you can change the flag and country name. On the left bar is a list of all the different structures you can build, such as farms, towns, and roads. Below that is a list of all the Points you have, which are used for performing actions (such as building, destroying, farming, etc.)

In the top right corner are the 3 health bars: Environment, Country Satisfaction, and Food Supply. If any one of them drains to zero, the game ends.

The button on the bottom right is used to go to the Next Day, which regenerates all your Points and shows you all the newspaper articles that highlight events in your country.

Resources

Resources are extracted from the structures you build (towns, farms, etc.) When you click on resources in your inventory, they are converted into Points or Cultural Items. There are resources like Metal, which you acquire by mining, but there are also abstract resources like Ideas.

Culture

Like mentioned earlier, you can convert Resources into Cultural Items. For example, there is a random chance that a Resource can get converted into a Cultural Item like a novel, poetry compilation, etc.

From there, you can give it a name, change its appearance, and then add it to your collection of your country’s produced cultural works.

Every cultural item you create will raise your Country Satisfaction level, meaning that culture serves a distinct purpose for keeping your nation happy.

The newspaper events at the end of each Day should reveal to you how your population is feeling as a result of this.

Environment

The environment is full of many natural landscapes. In the start of the game, you can place your country anywhere you want. This means you could have a nation hiding in the freezing mountains, camped in the arid desert, or living on an isolated island: highlighting how human populations can find ways to survive in any part of the world.

The more you build, the more your Environment bar will drain (forcing the player to consider how they use their land and what they place down). This means that they can’t just destroy everything in search of resources for they will poison their own citizens if they cause environmental damage.

Even the names of some of the tools used in the game for shaping the environment around you have very drastic and direct names for what they do. Instead of something like “Axe” for a tool for chopping wood, the tool is called “Deforestation” and has an image of a chainsaw cutting a tree stump. There are other tools like “Mining Excavator”, “Monoculture Grass”, “Land Reclamation”, and “Grove”.

I would argue that “Grove” should not belong on this list as a form of environmental destruction, but I think that any form of human interaction with the environment should be highlighted: that forest you just built wasn’t there before, who knows what effect it might’ve had on the animals or plants that were already living there.

If a player neglects their environment for long enough, they will lose the game in a game over screen similar to what is shown below.

To Be Improved

Countryworks functions very well at teaching the player how to be conscious of their environmental decisions. It teaches them to handle resource management in a different way through the challenges the game provides.

In the future, I would like the Country Satisfaction health bar to be more sophisticated. At the moment, it goes down during random events such as infrastructure breakdowns where the citizens will be unhappy. However, the only way to bring the Country Satisfaction back up is by producing Cultural Items (which have nothing to do with infrastructure), so in the future I will make infrastructure distinct from (but somehow related to) Country Satisfaction.

Conclusion

As I didn’t have enough time to gather detailed feedback on how the player perceived the environmental message, I still have work to do in the area of value messaging. The game is quite limited in scope but it definitely has the possibility of being something much more creative and sophisticated. I hope to improve on it more in the coming months and hopefully I will have something that is much more replayable and fun.

I had a lot of fun working on it and I hope to eventually publish it to my page at syndhex.itch.io.

Game by Bastión Toledo-Altamirano

Originally starting off as a silly idea with zombies and paper maps, my game project CountrySide developed into a fun experience that brought a smile to every playtester that encountered it. CountrySide is a tabletop role-playing resource management game where you play the role of a leader of a farming nation, rejuvenating the leveled wasteland by growing crops and fending off hordes of zombies as they swarm the landscape.

In the final version, almost every game piece is made from recycled or reused materials, evoking the scavenger-survivor atmosphere of using only recycled scraps at your disposal to create things. For example, the game mat is made from the remains of a package delivery box, the rules are handwritten onto a piece of a cereal box, and the game spinner is made from cardboard, a paperclip, and a brass fastener.

But what led me to the creative decisions I took when making this?

Research

After reading into the 1900s Dada art movement while I was developing this game, a few key points stood out to me. First, the Dada movement as a whole embodied a spirit of rebellion, activism, and endless creativity. The movement began in Zurich, and the Dada works created there evoked playfulness and childlike wonder. Second, when the movement reached Berlin, it took on a more political approach. Many works were critical of the nationalistic fervor at the time and their own country’s values. To them, art was a means of expressing their opinions in a way much more universal than words could. Finally, Dada seeks to take ordinary objects and inscribe within them new meaning. For example, “Le Cadeau” is a work from 1921 Paris that turns an iron into a menacing tool with spikes. This simple modification to a household object transforms the meaning of it from something not associated with danger, to deadly weapon.

How does this connect to my game?

Design Decisions: Playfulness & Childlike Wonder

Making all the game components out of objects you would find around the house was on purpose. This not only amplifies the atmosphere of apocalyptic hodgepodge creations, but serves to evoke the experiences of childhood, where kids would make games or creations out of cardboard boxes and enjoy it like any other board game. The pieces are meant to be simple enough to be replicated in a minute, allowing it to be played by kids, teens, or adults who have little time for setup and just want to get the game started for everyone to join in.

Design Decisions: Criticism of Values

When playing games, it is easy to get immersed in the world or mechanics but not think about the underlying values that games propagate. Many popular games on the market, both digital and physical, involve some form of competition, war, or theft. Many people find these games fun- including myself. I play and enjoy first-person shooter games, because of the fast-paced action and the feeling of triumph when you try your best against a rival team and win. However, I wanted my game to be something different. I wanted my game to be exciting, but teach the values of self-reliance, cooperation, and empathy.

Since the players can only win if everyone wins, and everyone loses if just one player loses, it forces the players to think as a collective unit. Everyone is focused on keeping themselves stable, but still being quick to offer help to another player.

In the game, land is seen as something to rejuvenate, care for, and protect, not something to conquer from another player or to buy and trade mindlessly like a commodity. This is in opposition to games like Risk that glorify land as a commodity to be taken from someone by force.

Finally, the game fosters empathy because each playthrough can put you in the shoes of another player. In one round you might be the food surplus distributor, and in another round you might be getting overrun with zombies and struggling to feed your nation. Since your starting position is determined by your luck at the beginning, it makes players think empathetically about others. I want the player to think like, “I’m doing well in this round, but the player across from me is struggling. I remember struggling like that last round.”

Design Decisions: Inscribing New Meaning

This one is more philosophical than concrete in terms of my design, but I think that it is interesting to see found objects take on a new meaning. I like seeing the shift in meaning from a paper city map, used to inform tourists, to becoming a representation for a post-apocalyptic city that you and your companions are fighting to bring life to. I like seeing popsicle sticks, a remnant of a food item, being used as a token to represent food itself. Inspired by the Dada movement, CountrySide seeks to shape the meaning of common objects and give them new life within this new fantasy world.

Gameplay

In a global zombie apocalypse, every city has been destroyed and leveled to just the streets. In the midst of chaos, several people have decided to form nations of survivors to cultivate the land, protect each other, and create civilization anew.

Each person represents the leader of their own survivor nation run by farmers and protectors.

Game Objective

• To win, every person must acquire 15 Plots of Land, and not have a single Zombie in their nation.
• If one player loses, everyone loses.
  • If you go into Food debt, your nation enters Food Shortage. Put a scrap of paper that says “Food Shortage” next to your game pieces. If you enter Food Shortage again while currently in a Food Shortage, you lose.
  • If every Plot of Land, including your Town Hall, is occupied by Zombies, you lose.

Game Pieces

• Paper city map: Each city block represents a Plot of Land.
• (Recommended) Flat pieces of cardboard to put under the map
• d10 Die / 1-10 Spinner
• d6 Die / 1-6 Spinner
• A lot of tokens to represent Food
• A handful of tokens to represent Guardians
• A lot of pushpins / thumbtacks to represent Zombies
• A handful of coins
• Colorful pens or pencils, unique to each player

Game Setup

1. Every player must pick a Plot of Land on the map. Draw a small circle around it. This is your Town Hall.
2. Select a Plot of Land adjacent to your Town Hall. Color it in with your pen. Then do this again 4 more times, so you should have a total of 5 Plots of Land colored in.
   1. Do all the plots have to be touching the Town Hall? No. Your plots can be adjacent to each other, but not necessarily have to touch the Town Hall. If you wanted to make a nation that is one long strip of land you could.
   2. Can the plots of land skip over water features like a river? If there is a bridge or some feature that allows crossing, then yes. If there isn’t, then no. If it is unclear, you can draw a bridge and then connect it to your nation.
3. Each player must collect 10 Food tokens.
4. Each player must collect 1 Guardian token.
5. Spin the 1-10 spinner or roll the d10 die to see who gets the highest number. Break any ties by rolling or spinning again. The highest number goes first. The turn direction is clockwise.

Turns

On your turn, perform these 4 actions:

1. Situation Roll
2. Production Count
3. Consumption Roll
4. Zombie Infection

SITUATION ROLL: Spin the 1-10 spinner or roll the d10 die. Perform the action that corresponds to the number.

• 1-4: You get 1 more Plot of Land.
• 5-6: Random Event. Check the Random Event table below, then roll or spin again.
• 7-10: Add a new Zombie to a land on your nation.

PRODUCTION COUNT: You will flip coins for food production. Count how many Plots of Land you have that do NOT have Zombies on them. Do not count your Town Hall either. Flip that number of coins. Every coin that lands on “heads” means +1 Food token to you. // If you are currently in Food Shortage, flipping at least ONE “heads” means you are no longer in Food Shortage.

CONSUMPTION ROLL: Roll the d6 or spin the 1-6 spinner. Subtract that many Food tokens from your nation. // If you reach negative food, then clear out all your Food tokens. You are now in a Food Shortage.

ZOMBIE INFECTION: If you do not have any Zombies on your land, ignore this step. If you do, for every Zombie you have on your nation, flip a coin. For every coin that lands on “tails”, add one more Zombie onto your nation.

• Do I have to flip a coin for this Zombie?
  • If it was added on a previous turn, YES.
  • If it was added on this current turn (your Situation Roll), NO.
  • If you just now flipped a coin for Zombie Infection and added this new zombie, NO.

Out of Turn

Outside of your turn, at any time, you can share Food and Guardians with other players. You are also allowed to discard 1 Guardian in exchange for destroying 1 Zombie at any point. There is no limit to how many Guardians you can use or how much Food or Guardians you can share.

Random Event

If you get a Random Event on your turn, roll the d10 or spin the 1-10 spinner again. See the effects of the event.

1. Get +1 Free Guardian
2. Get +2 Free Guardians
3. Everyone gets +1 Free Food
4. Pick any nation (including yourself) and they will magically gain +2 Food.
5. Get +2 Free Plots of Land
6. Add a new Zombie to your nation
7. Add two new Zombies to your nation
8. One of your lands becomes unusable for the rest of the game. Cross it out.
9. Lose 2 Food.
10. Everyone loses 1 Food.

Images by Bastión Toledo-Altamirano
Game design by Bastión Toledo-Altamirano
A huge thanks to all 6+ of the people who playtested this 🙂

As someone passionate about linguistics and education, I am always trying to find new ways to teach linguistics concepts in clever ways that can be understood easily. This idea for a linguistics score / word evolution exercise was inspired by a combination of the classic Broken Telephone Game and Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit that details many instructions for creating works of art, often abstract or even impossible. Unlike Yoko Ono’s work, I wanted to create something that was more tangible.

This score used to be more social justice-motivated, however I found it difficult to articulate my thoughts in alignment with the design choices so I omitted it in this version. In a future iteration of this score, I will try to focus more on the social justice message.

The score is as follows:

1. Gather a bunch of people in a noisy room. Everyone should be facing the same direction, organized in a binary branching tree structure. This means that there is one person at the front center of the room, “Person 1”. Behind Person 1 are 2 people to either side of that person, Person 2 and Person 3. Person 2 and Person 3 should each have 2 people standing behind them to either side, and so on until there are no more people remaining.
2. Give everyone a writing instrument and a surface to write on.
3. Person 1 should secretly write down their hometown. Then, they should write it again, but backwards, in all lowercase, as one word. For example, “San Diego CA” would be “acogeidnas”.
4. Person 1 should try to pronounce this word, quietly, to Person 2 and Person 3. Say the word twice, quietly but clearly.
5. Person 2 and Person 3 should write down what they heard, as best they can.
6. Person 2 and Person 3 should then turn around to each of their 2 people and whisper the word they wrote down to them, twice. The ones who hear the word should then write down what they heard, and repeat the process until everyone has written down something.
7. Lay all the words flat on a surface and review how the words have changed from person to person.

The results of this score are quite intriguing. After running two trial runs in a classroom setting, one can see that consonants get flipped, whole syllables get erased, and complexity gets turned into simplicity. It is quite difficult for one to hear a word that they don’t recognize and try to recall it correctly, since we tend to remember phonological patterns we’re familiar with.

For example, one such trial started with the word “amnotnikpoh” for Hopkinton, MA and it became:

• Adoknicough
• Abdokmipa
• Amnotnikpol
• Adoknikal
• Mnanikal
• Amnonekal

Another trial started with the word “ailognomrenni” for Inner Mongolia and it became:

• Ilocnolerni
• Ilognomeli
• Ilognomerny
• Ilognomobi
• Ailucknomerne
• Aiglagnomali

This was an interesting exercise to see how the word for a place (although encrypted initially) slowly distorts as it passes from person to person, and volume/noise (which was simulated through the noisy room) can also contribute to the phonological changes that arise from this.

The results of this experience are artistic in nature. I compare it to the works produced in the Fluxus era, and as Jacquelynn Baas and others write in their book Fluxus and the Essential Questions of Life, “It should not be surprising, then, that people sometimes have a hard time experiencing Fluxus objects as art. They are not “art”; they are more like tools or games” (Baas et al., 2011, p. 8). With a mindset of artistic creation, I hope linguistics and other educators can take this approach to classroom activities because they can encourage learning in a way that is unique and inspiring.