The first physical game I worked on at Rider University, Seasonal Journey, was for my Game Design class in the Fall of 2024. I remember my professor requiring us to use a random prompt generator to come up with potential themes for our games (this made the task a little less daunting!). After going through a few possible themes, the one that caught my eye the most was titled “Four Seasons.” One thing to note about me is that I find the seasons in general very fascinating, especially Autumn (hence the name of one of my published games, Autumnal Adventure). While coming up with possible mechanics for this theme, I thought of the game Super Mario Party, specifically the 2018 title. I was watching a YouTube video at the time where four friends were racing around the board, having an overall fun time. I thought to myself, I think the theme of four seasons could work really well as a physical board game inspired by the Mario Party games, with each section being its own season.
The first iteration of the game that I came up with was to have a maximum of four players race through each season, collecting coins on their journey that could be used to buy power ups. The winner of the game would be the player that collected the most coins. This game also featured various spaces for the players to land on. One of these special spaces was the “Weather Event” Space, a spot that sent every player located within a particular season back to the start of that region. Seasonal Journey also featured an item shop with tons of different power-ups that players could buy with their coins. The catch with the item shop is that players could only access if they landed on that space. One additional feature that I think made this game more fun was the creation of a special group of cards called “Chance Cards.” Each season had it’s own set, with each card giving either the player who drew the card or all of the players on the board a positive or negative effect to help aid or hinder their journey.
After witnessing a couple of play tests, I realized that this game has a lot of potential. The players overall seemed to grasp the rules fairly quickly and appeared to have a ton of fun. While there were some minor draw backs, like players not using their coins to buy power-ups since the winner was determined by who had the highest coin total, the game itself ran really smoothly and would eventually lead to the latest iteration of Seasonal Journey! (I will probably talk about this new iteration in a future blog post!)