BCM300 Playtesting and Abstraction

To follow on with my game development from the previous week of playtesting as suggested by those in my playtesting group, I have further developed my game and experimented with a slightly differed scoring system, as well as realising ways to improve logistics of my game
My game (working title) ‘Noun knock off’ has improved as suggested by adding far more difficult adjectives including complex adjectives such a romantic and toasty and crunchy. It was recommended after my previous session of playtesting that it’d be a good idea to increase the difficulty of the adjectives words so that failure to guess them was more common and that challenging adjectives were common. This adds an element to the game in which there are some very simple adjectives like happy, while others like ‘toasty’ which aren’t as simple to draw over the top of another drawing. While a happy tree, might be drawn easily, a romantic plane may not be expressed so easily. As well as this, I have decided to decrease the timer from 30 seconds down to 20 seconds for each player to draw for both the noun and adjectives.
This leads me to two key things that need to be further developed in the game and that I think our important to the game.
Firstly given that the mechanics and enjoyment regarding creatively drawing and then drawing over an original drawing has been described as very fun in this current iteration I feel one issue that could occur is the sense of disappointment of players repeatedly getting difficult words rather than simpler ones. This made me think of a way to fix this issue, if there were 2-3 different piles of noun cards or 2-3 different piles of adjectives cards with a differing degree of difficulty for each pile. For example, blue adjective cards are simple words like happy, fluffy and spiky. Red adjective cards are slightly more complex cards like jealous, scary and victorious. There could also be yellow adjective cards that are the most difficult with very complex adjectives that need a particularly keen and creative mind to be able to represent in a drawing, these would be words such as old-fashioned, curious and nutritious. Words that seem extremely difficult to represent, however with each increase in difficulty the reward in points/movement per square would be increased. This of course is a new concept that would need to be playtested, but this would allow for younger players who only understand simpler concepts in regards to adjectives to pick simpler cards, and those who are behind on the race on the actual board to try to catch up or create a lead by picking difficult cards.
Example,
Most difficult: Yellow 5 points
Second most difficult: Red 3 points
Easiest: Blue 2 points
This could be done for both adjectives and nouns, but I feel is most effective on adjectives.

The other point that I think could be important to consider is experimenting with the design of my board, currently I have a linear board game design styled after Dixit (as described in my previous post). However, Christopher Moore suggested the potential of using a different board game design, as such during this next week I intend to have look at different alternative board game designs and try a different one for my next playtest build. I’d also like to produce the different difficulty cards for the next playtest as well.

Finally in regards to the abstraction of my game, my game appears to be a ‘race game’ in its competitive sense but is also a game that has a theme of creative outside the box thinking in which players are challenged to try to represent words in absurd obscure ways, as well as modifying original drawings in a creative manner to convey an adjective. This I believe is the theme of my game and is also the greatest potential of my game as there are many, many different combinations of nouns and adjectives and because the game uses the players creativity to form an equivalent of a ‘narrative’ the game forges ahead by exhausting the players creativity in a fun competitive matter.