IGDA informal meet Feb 29th 2008 Report [March 5th, 2008 – 8:50 am]

The IGDA February Informal Meet was attended by myself and Wolf of GameBrains, Buzz and Kenny from JGG, two foundation-year students from One Academy, Jeffry Chua, Ridhwan and Sufyan Bakir of the Mystic Order makers and Aznan Falzi from MMU.

Wolf is a Lead Game Designer in GameBrains, and in his free time he runs a board game/tabletop game shop. I thought it'll be interesting to have an informal session while playing board games, and Wolf was happy to be host for this meeting.

Wolf's shop was in a shoplot near the Digital Mall in SS2, and it wasn't easy to find. An early batch did arrive on time, and the meeting started at 830pm.

Wolf has already readied the games to present, and he had the guests play in terms in increasing complexity. Before starting, he briefed the guests on the different types of board games and how they're different in design.

The first game presented was "Mmm... Brains", a Zombie-themed game that's designed to run for about 10 minutes at a time. Distribute them brains and force your friends to give up theirs.

Next up is Modern Art. Wolf asked everyone to pay attention to the game mechanics to this one, as there was a twist to it that makes playing the game very interesting. Once players got that twist, the bidding wars got into a serious swing.

People were slowly trickling in at this time, so Wolf repeated the Modern Art session with the newcomers.

The last game for trying out was Roborally, a game Wolf claims programmers should be really good at it. That's a challenge to the programmers among the group. The game involves planning out movement algorithms, and it was funny seeing player's reaction when their nicely-planned algorithm got thrown out of whack, simply because another player bumped his piece by one square.

The IGDA meeting ended at 11pm. Wolf said he would be happy to run a session like this again if there are requests for it.