Duration 15 weeks (Jan 15 - May 5, 2018)
Team Size 6
Platform Tabletop + Mobile
Links Official Website
Project Info:
Enigma is a hybrid tabletop role-playing experience enhanced by physical props and mobile application. It also involves collaborative puzzle solving sessions.
Players will play as women code-breakers working at Bletchley Park in England during World War II, who contributed significantly to decoding the German army’s ultimate cipher machine – Enigma, but can not tell anyone what they have done. They will walk through a story from entering the Bletchley Park, becoming a team, to working together, sharing news from family, in the end, to a big event Coventry Bombing as a climax, where the emotional impact is really huge.
More information can be found in it's website.
Notable Contribution:
■ Worked as lead designer, responsible for the whole picture, led the team in design decision making, coordinated the design work with other designers.
■ As experience designer, designed a two-hour long experience flow as framework of the experience, where role playing, puzzles and App interaction are working. See the experience flow here.
■ Held playtest sessions, guided and collaborated with the team to iterate on the whole experience.
■ Above is a video shows you how the experience flows.
Interesting Stories Behind it
■ As a followup to Rosenstrasse, our client are designing a new War Birds game about women code breakers of Bletchley Park, who saved thousands of lives, but couldn't tell people what they were doing and needed to return to far more confining jobs after war. The game will be 3-5 hours. This project is to help our client discover how puzzles, digital app and physical props can help create a better role playing game.
■ We were originally asked to design a 10-15 minutes collaborative puzzle-solving activity, but we decided to build a whole 2 hour long experience because we need a context to design the activity, and to evaluate the activity.
■ Due to the respect to historical facts, we picked a historical event Coventry Blitz and players can not change the history. In the experience, they figured out when and where the German bombing will happen, delivered the information to Churchill, but Churchill didn’t take any defensive measures, lest the Germans suspect that their cipher had been broken.
■ We thought digital apps would be used as tools to solve puzzles, but that would make players too attached to the phones. In stead we placed them on the table where everyone can use them but no one owns them. makes used it for
■ The voice recording of Winston Churchill in the experience was recorded by Anthony Daniels (C3PO).
■ See more details in a blog post I wrote about the design challenges we met here.
■ Find our final presentation here
