Thales the card game | 2020 (3 months)
Game Designer | UI/UX
Website
Theme
Card game | Anti submarine Warfare | Cooperation
Pitch
Thales : the card game is a two players cooperative strategy board game. Where players will control a frigate and a maritime patrol aircraft in order to prevent a submarine from accomplishing its mission.
01.
Context
During my third year at rubika supinfogame, I worked on a project in collaboration with Thales, a french company that design and build electrical systems in the fields of aerospace, defense, transportation and security. The objective of this project was to explain the anti submarine warfare to uninitiated people. The game would also be made available in trade fairs to present Thales products. It had to be an attractive and funny game, so that customers would be interested in Thales products.
02.
My work
The anti submarine warfare is a complex subject, with a lot of different parameters, so we had to choose the most important aspects and simplify them in order to create a more accessible game. Even if our game mechanics were simple, we tried to be as close as reality as possible.
The first important aspect of anti-submarine warfare is the cooperation between the naval forces that search the submarine. So we aim to transcribe this cooperation between two players. In the end, we had two players with the same objective, but with different actions, that complement each other. The actions of the first player were management focused, while the other was reaction focused.
The common objective of the players was to find a submarine, but we didn't want the submarine to be played by a third player. So we made the submarine played automatically by the game. However, we tried to make his behaviour easy to handle by the players. Despite this, we managed to create an interesting threat by hiding the submarine information. Moreover, this represents well the discreet aspect of the submarine.
We also worked on cards ergonomics, since the topic was complex we tried to make our cards easily readable in order to prevent the player from being lost. We also tried to promote Thales equipment.
I learned how to work with a huge team of 12 game designers. It was an interesting experience because we organised ourselves to be as efficient as possible during key moments. So it allowed us to make a lot of prototypes, and many iterations.
Finally, at the end of the project I worked on the rules writing of the game. They had to be concise, and well arranged to be understood quickly.
03.
Conclusion
This project was my first project for a client. It was an interesting experience, because we had to adapt to their requests during the project and therefore be flexible. Creating a board game in only 3 months was hard, even if we were 12, we weren’t fully able to organise a lot of playtest for example.
Other members of the team :
Antoine Grugeon | Game Designer
Paul Paret | Game Designer
Simon Picardat | Game Designer
Thibaut Le Doare | Game Designer
Luc Vidal | Game Designer
Côme Richetta | Game Designer
Thomas Depraz - Depland | Game Designer
Théodore Labyt | Game Designer
Rémi Secher | Game Designer
Arthur Deleye | Game Designer
Antoine Leroux | Game Designer
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