Don't Carry The Weight

‘Don’t Carry The Weight’ is a collaborative board game that was built to be played through the Steam workshop in Tabletop Simulator. The aim of this project was to develop a game that could impart a transformative effect on people. Our idea was that every player in this game would embody a character that is struggling with stress and anxiety in their life. Each player might encounter similar stressors but it might affect them differently.

In this game players start at the ‘Start Tile’ and then take turns rolling dice to progress until they reach the ‘End Tile’. We wanted players to understand the struggles of navigating the world while dealing with stress and anxiety. As a result, we decided that ‘Stress’ would be a visible attribute in the game which would affect how many spaces a player could move. This amount was determined by the [Sum on Dice] - [Stress].

In life, we have a general idea of the direction that we want to progress towards but we do not know what the future holds for us. We wanted to simulate the same experience within our game so we decided that the map will only be revealed to the players as they progress. Therefore, when moving, players take tiles from the ‘Tile Deck’ and place it on the space they wish to move.

To simulate the full experience, we decided that we would have a variation of tiles within the deck. The basic tiles allowed players to move without any positive or negative consequence. ‘Void Tiles’ would block the player's path and prevent them from progressing further forcing them to track back. Finally, ‘Event Tiles’ would force players to encounter two different types of events ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’. These events would affect their stress levels and health levels within the games.

Furthermore, based on the feedback we received through our playtests, we decided to include more narrative and collaboration based features which worked to encourage players to work together to progress towards the end. Based on our final playtest, I believe that we achieved the majority of our objectives and players had fun when they played the game.

If we had more time to dedicate to this project, I would have loved to further develop the narrative elements within the game and further refine the mechanics to enable more cooperation between the players.