Crumbling Cliffs

A Sumo-themed board game for 2-4 players where you control 3 pieces on a constantly shrinking board. The goal is to be the last one standing by pushing all the other pieces off the board. The more pieces you keep alive, the more points you score in the end. Do you have what it takes to keep yourself alive?

This was a project designed alongside Haocheng Liu (1st year IMGD MFA Student) and Stephen Zhou (1st year IMGD MFA Student) for Sean Bloom's Design for Interactive Media course at USC School of Cinematic Arts. We were tasked with creating a game inspired by Up the River. After brainstorming, we were initially going to create a game simulating the rotation of the earth and avoiding the sunlight. We found that the most fun aspect of that game, though, was the mechanic of pushing your opponent into the sunlight. So we expanded on that and designed Crumbling Cliffs. Although a very effective system, we discovered through this project the difficulty of writing instructions and how players may interpret those instructions. Through playtesting, we iterated on our instructions several times until we landed on a final version. Overall, the game was a resounding success with overwhelmingly positive feedback from students, faculty, and people outside the program as well.