Tact: A board Game
Enabling early learners to grasp the concept of arithmetics through engaging play and strategy.
Product Design
Game Design
Branding
Packaging
👉🏼 OVERVIEW
The Challenge
Creating a game of our choice during the game design module in the second year of college.
The Solution
A board game that allows for learning through play involving the concept of subtraction.
Teammates
2 UX Designers
Timelines
1 week (part of the game design module in college)
My Role
Concept Ideation, Elements and gameplay creation.
Worked on the packaging and branding with my fellow designer.
Client
Internal Project
👉🏼 OUTCOME
👉🏼 IDEATION
Target Audience
Inspired by toy designer Cas Holman, I decided to design a game specifically for early learners, focusing on children aged 8 and above. This project aims to engage young minds through playful, educational interactions.
👉🏼 DESIGN SOLUTION
Goal
Involving the concept of subtraction, the game requires the players to tactfully empty their opponents board while taking turns to do so in a sequential manner using the components of the game; cards and tiles.
Concept Exploration
We narrowed down the theme of our game after multiple discussions. The target audience attributes were also taken into consideration.
Game Components
Gameplay
The game incorporates arithmetic to introduce a learning element, enabling users to enhance their skills as they play. It also emphasizes group learning, making the experience more engaging through collaborative activities. Designed as a physical game, it breaks the cycle of early digital exposure for children aged 8-12, encouraging them to engage in hands-on play rather than relying on additional digital stimulation.
We individually came up various concepts for the game and finalised a non narrative sequential board game. We pulled inspiration from existing games such as Uno, Bingo and scrabble that are highly engaging played in short durations.
Board
Is square in shape, accommodating a total of 9 tiles. Each player is to defend their board and try to remove the tiles from their opponents board.
A player able to remove all the tiles from the opponents board while having at-least one tile on their board wins.
Tiles
The tiles range from number 1 to 30. Players are pick and place 9 random tiles onto their board.
Cards
The cards range from the number 1 to 30.
Players pick a random card from a deck and use it to remove tiles from their opponents deck or add tiles to their deck.
Visitors understand the artwork when they’re with a tour guide but these tours don’t happen all day.
👉🏼 FLOOR TESTING
After testing the game with students in the class, we came across feedback that helped iterate the game to improve engagement.
👉🏼 PACKAGING
I sketched a few ideas on procreate to try out unique ways of packaging the product. We wanted to the packaging to be suitable for both adults and kids.
👉🏼 BRANDING
After exploring various concepts for the logo, we ultimately chose my teammate's design. He also developed the logo and brand identity.
Range of cards and tiles
We found that kids that young struggle with adding and subtracting higher numbers. So, we altered the range to numbers 1 - 25.
Number of cards
Players were put in a position where they had cards they couldn’t use in the game. In order to remove this sense of helplessness we increased the number of cards with numbers 1-20 and decreased the cards with number 20-25.
Action cards
The game tended to be longer than expected leading to boredom after the first 30 minutes. In order to shorten it and make it more challenging, we introduced action cards.
We updated our gameplay accordingly.
👉🏼
👉🏼 REFLECTION
Don’t fear to fall
When tasked with ideating a game concept, my initial inclination was to create a multiplayer video game, given the abundance of such games in the market and the limited time frame we had. However, after team discussions, we decided to explore a broader range of ideas and focus on something unique, rather than sticking to the typical multiplayer video game format.
Balancing Creativity and Practicality
Packaging design can be complex, especially when ambitious concepts come into play. Balancing creativity with functionality requires careful consideration of aesthetics, materials, costs, and sustainability. Overly ambitious designs often lead to trade-offs between visual appeal and practicality. The key challenge is finding a balance between innovation and feasibility.
Experiments
