Illustration by Michael DeForge
Verminville
Alex Tang, Christine Mi, Maggie Wang, Marty Scott, Rio Flores, Steele Citrone
+In one or two sentences, describe the main themes present in your game.
Verminville is a shared space board game about expanding your territory with strategic tile placement and managing finite resources. You play as different vermin attacking and proliferating in order to dominate the board on your preferred territory.
+What was the inspiration of the game?
What made your team decide to make this game specifically?
This game started with the project prompt of “connecting pieces” and our fixation on the rats in NYC subways which we generalized to the broader category of vermin. Some major influences were Settlers of Catan, Kingdomino, and Cascadia.
+Were there difficult moments when developing the game? What led to those difficult moments? What did you learn from it?
There is so much playtesting involved with creating a board game and one of the most challenging aspects was maintaining momentum while playing the game over and over to test new mechanics. At some point, we hit a roadblock and struggled to redesign our systems with more complexity while striking a balance that was fun and strategic. This required taking our systems apart entirely and following the fun as we rebuilt them.
+Were there features you had to remove, and if so, what were they and why were they removed?
We formerly had a limitless map - players could sprawl in any direction they wanted rather than being contained within a large hex grid. We found that this encouraged players to run off in different directions and play apart from each other, but we wanted to emphasize competition and conflict so we introduced a limited board size.
+Talk about your teammates! What was everyone's role?
Everyone was involved in the design and testing of the game. Art assets were created by Maggie and Christine.