Instinct Background

Instinct is a deckbuilding, tactical combat board game for two players. You play as the queen of a bug colony. Each player starts with a deck of cards and the queen. You spawn new workers and warriors using your cards, and use those bugs to harvest resources on the map and attack opponents. These resources are spent to buy new cards, which give opportunities for more effective attacks, better movements, worker upgrades, etc. A player wins when they defeat the opponent’s queen. To see the complete rules click here.

Game Requirements

Instinct was designed over three weeks for Jesse Schell’s game design course at Carnegie Mellon. The assignment is was called “Frontier of Freedom” and challenged students to design, develop, and playtest a game of the style and type of our choosing with the only requirement being that the game is excellent.

Playtesting and Iteration

As part of Instincts’ development I ran 11 rounds of playtesting with both new players and “expert” repeat players. Using the information gathered from these tests I adapted the map to counteract dominant strategies, simplified card UI to make the game more playable, and finely tuned the parameters on game cards. For more details on the playtests click here.

Card Design

For this game I wanted to combine elements from deckbuilding games like Dominion with the unit positioning of Chess. The cards have a combination of effects from each genera. Some enable movement of pieces, others draw cards, and some place new bugs on the map! To learn more about the cards click here.