The Liar's Dice Challenge

So in another post (found Here) I talked about a game called Liar's Dice which is a dice game where players must guess how many dice are on specific faces underneath cups , for example a player could guess that there are two dice face up on four. 

Now when we originally discussed what modifications we wanted to do to the game, we ended up debating and discussing a lot because some of the ideas we had come  up with didn't fix the balance in the game but actually unbalanced it even more. Many ideas, some of which could be implemented in another game later in time, where scraped until we finally came up with our final modifications.

Researching the Game Rules and Planning of Possible Modifications

 While we thought we had successfully completed the given assignment, we later noticed, after rereading the assignment sheet to make sure we didn't miss anything and my lecture notes from our last class, that many of our modifications ended up adding a positive feedback loop to the game instead of adding a negative one or removing the current positive ones already in the game. Below you can see a bit of our discussions on how to fix our positive feedback issues.

Our original modifications included the following:

• Players may discard a "1" dice to look at another player's cup. - Jesse
• Players who guess right gain a dice. - Evelyn
• If you have more than 6 players, you team up into groups of 3 - Laura
• If everyone has guessed two times in a row with no guesses, reroll one die. That die has to be shown. - Clement.
• any player that loses a round must act like Jack Sparrow for one round - GianLuca

 Looking at these we quickly realized that we had made a few mistakes when coming up with our modifications (I think it might have been from the fact that the first time we attempted to modify that game we were all exhausted from our weekend activities) which we discussed via skype in an attempt to resolve our issues with our modifications.

Our Skype Conversations Discussing How to Change Our Modifications

After discussing and readjusting our modifications we finally came up with a set of modifications that we feel as a group will eliminate some of the positive feedback loops in the game Liar's Dice. These are the modifications that we came up with after reworking our previous ones:

• Players may discard a "1" dice to look at another player's cup. - Jesse
• At the end of a round the winner removes a dice from their hand and gives it to the loser of the round - Evelyn
• In a game of 3 or more players, players can form alliances with another player which can protect a player that is about to be eliminated only if the ally player guessed right (or is not called out as a liar)-Laura
• If everyone has guessed two times in a row with no guesses, reroll one die. That die has to be shown. - Clement.
• any player that loses a round must act like Jack Sparrow for one round; in doing so, they choose one of the outcomes for one of the dice - Gianluca

MY THOUGHTS:
This assignment was one of the most annoying and difficult one yet and to be honest I have no idea how well my groups modifications will go over with the other groups. Trying to remove the positive feedback loops was extremely difficult  and while this was a good exercise to teach us the challenges of the feedback loops, I really disliked this assignment (it was really aggravating trying to constantly rework  and create new modifications that removed that loop and didn't add more positive loops). I'm extremely interested in seeing how the other groups managed to modify Liar's Dice especially since my group had such a difficult time modifying this game without adding more positive feedback loops.