Team Project: Keng-Kai Chang/ Christian R Sutton

Escape by Hare's Breadth: Board Game/ Narrative Game / 2 Players

- A narrative card game which is designed to represent the story of the Grimm’s fairy tale “A Hare’s Bride.”

- A hybrid evolution of deduction game, card game and resource collecting with Time Card Mechanic and Sack Mechanic.

 

Escape by Hare's Breadth is a narrative card game designed to represent the story of the Grimm’s fairy tale “A Hare’s Bride.” It is a two-player game where participants take the role of either the girl and try to escape the hare’s clutches, or play as the hare and try to stop the girl from escaping before they can wedding.

 

The game was originally conceived of as a two-player, two phase game, where the Hare has advantage during phase 1, acquiring cabbage which would carry over as advantage into the second phase where the Girl has advantage and true winner is decided. Because the girl escapes in the story, it was an interesting challenge to attempt to represent this aspect in the game while still making it fun and fair.

 

Each phase is weighted with a fairly strong advantage towards the player with lower card, done as a design choice to give the game a modern fairytale, Girl-centric feel with the image of a daughter and parent enjoying playing together.

 

The Girl’s win conditions are less strict, but the Hare can severely impact her likelihood of winning.

It’s hard but possible to make strong plays during the Time Card phases from the disadvantaged position to disrupt the opponent and impact their chance to win.

 

Ultimately there is a fair element of randomness in selecting resources from the bags blindly, but the ability to control what goes into the bag as well as make smart strategic choices during the card phase make the game interesting and replayable.