Forgotten

This was a fun project where two classmates and I created a board game off of  a provided Pre-existing IP, Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind. We were all fans of the film and thought  the complexity, and nuances of the story would be a fun design challenge.  Through many playtests and design iterations we feel happy with our final product and hope you enjoy. 

You can find the download link at the bottom of the page.

Assignment: Each team will create a table-top game based on an assigned pre-existing intellectual property (IP). The design of this game will use verbs as a conceptual tool, according to the methods shown in class. 

Verbs: Forgetting, Remembering, having something on the Tip of the Tongue, Reacting, and Erasing

Brief Design Rationale: This game is an iteration of the game Memory and it proved to be a great base for our design. Often in playing Memory, players reveal a different image than they intended or struggle to find the one they are looking for. It requires knowledge that is only relevant in the current game state and prior strategy is ineffective in many ways.  We immediately thought to use the tiles as a representation of Joel's memories and the board his mind, both players would search to reveal a memory and as a result preserve it on the board. Unlike Memory, which uses the same images to make pairings, we wanted to use one base image and a specific aspect of that image as the pairing since many of the memories Joel navigated in the film were prompted by remembering a specific piece of the larger memory. Like during the surgeries preparation when the Doctor and assistants used objects to map the memories of Clementine in Joel’s mind, we wanted our memory tiles to represent smaller portions of the memory that in a way hold the entirety of the memory itself. Beyond uncovering memories, this version didn’t contain many of the elements of the film like attempting to persevere Clementine.

In trying to connect our game to the film we wanted to add a goal and sense of urgency to play. Since players of Memory often sit on opposite sides of the board we thought by having players create a path from one to another through connecting revealed tiles it would thematically reflect Joel’s attempt to reconnect with Clementine by stringing a series of memories together. But without any pressure, success was inevitable and the erasure process in the film remained absent from the game. As a result, we decided to organize the games memory tiles into a 6x6 grid.  By organizing the tiles in a 6x6 grid we could give each memory tile a coordinate in Joel’s mind like in the film. Then by rolling two 6 sided dice, representing the X and Y axis, memories could be deleted in between turns. This proved very effective and added to the feeling of helplessness and urgency that Joel felt in the film. Players would need to work strategically to reveal the necessary tiles to create a complete pathway before the tiles to create matches were removed or the pathway itself would become impossible with the remaining tiles. 

Tiles that were deleted before being revealed would always be unknown, we tried exposing them to players but felt that not knowing which ones were deleted fit more strongly with the events in the film. A result of erasing tiles is players will not always win. We tested various ways of erasing tiles: tiles that were already matched could not be deleted, if the rolled coordinates were a tile that had already been deleted the dice would be rolled again, and the three tiles adjacent to the starting position could not be deleted. But these actions were to make the game easier for players and added abilities to erasure process that wasn’t present in the film. We decided that whatever coordinates are rolled should reflect the tile deleted and if the tile has already been deleted then players were lucky.