Nice Thinking: ”Pizza Land”

Ellen's nephews have charged her with the task of making a board game about pizza. Making a clone of Hasbro's Candy Land is more difficult than it sounds, especially since these young stakeholders have requested some "creative deviations" from the design of the original board game. Stephen and Mark step in to help out. Can your nice hosts realize the wild, cheesy dream that is Pizza Land?

• Candy Land, a classic board game for kids - Hasbro
• That meme from The Office - Giphy
• Gharial, a weird-looking endangered crocodilian - Animalogic, YouTube

Nice Thinking Notes Ellen Burns-JohnsonGame Design Children's drawings

The art is here on Google Drive for you all to enjoy. 

• Whale, may or may not be pizza-related
• T-rex sort of on fire, facing us
• Brontosaurus amoeba
• Cat and soulless dog 
• [Pizza] donut
• Pizza Knight with an axe, maybe
• Ice cream leaking out of the cone
• Pizza t-rex
• Pizza crocodile
• Pizza shark
• Pizza rock, since upgraded to pizza geode
• Pizza pyramid
• Man made of pizzas x 2

Ellen's drawings

• Ellen's drawings
• Sea of Sauce
• Garlic Bread Grove
• Pizza Dough Desert
• Calzone Quarry (not pictured)
• and here's a link to the spreadsheet mentioned in the episode

Game design conclusions

• Players start out with a random collection of ingredients
• They collect ingredients as they go through the game
• Everyone’s delivering a pizza and they start with a crust
• The Pizza Knight has specific interests & tastes in each game, so different ingredients are more important in each playthrough
• If a monster catches you it eats a certain number of ingredients (0, 1, 2, or 3)
• A grading scale for the team; the pizza knight filling out stars on the app

Movement with d6s. When players move, they can roll 2 dice and choose the result, moving forwards or backwards.

Unspoken, but maybe good ideas?

• Monsters all move on the same die roll, and they only move forward.
• Players have to be on the same tile to give an object to another person.