Last week, I went to Board Game Camp in London (which is part of the reason things have been so quiet around here). The first part of the day involved a chance to take part in a competition to design the back of the 2012 Cadbury’s Medium Sized Selection Box. The prize? To have your winning game put onto the back of the 2012 Cadbury’s Medium Sized Selection Box, which sells in the region of 9 million units a year.
Over the course of an hour or two, Ryan Alexander, Catherine Wooley, Herm Baskerville and I set to work designing a game suitable for 5-12 year olds, that was incredibly simple, fun to play and could make use of the Cadbury’s Spots vs Stripes campaign. This is what we came up with. It didn’t win.
We’re still pretty happy with it as a game though. Sure, it might not have been quite as innovative as some of the other games, but it did play really nicely (and was balanced too, which was nice), and had a really short turnaround per game, which we thought was important. We may not have won, but we sure did have a lot of fun getting there.
For those of you who are interested, the original art we drew for the contest is up on flickr.
UPDATE!
I’ve just been reminded by Herm to mention that the game plays well with two, three or four players because of the requirement that all members on a team having to finish for that team to win. We also had an optional rule for the game that allowed you to use chocolate bars to stop the other team using their special powers against you. All chocolate bars played during the game would then get divided up amongst the winning team at the end. Yummy.
