This is a prototype for a one-player card game themed around air travel. I aimed to make use of a few specific mechanics, namely card drafting and the concept of "moving through the deck". This project allowed me to focus on balancing specific rules and mechanics in order to deliver an engaging yet challenging gameplay experience.
This game is called “Airport Scramble.” The goal of Airport Scramble is to build and utilize an international web of airports, seeing how many tickets you can complete as you balance between building your chain of airport destinations and flying your plane from location to location to deliver passengers.
Materials
- Airport Card Deck
- Ticket Card Deck
- Airplane Pawn
- 8-sided Die
Gameplay
The play space of Airport Scramble is divided into 3 general areas. There is the “play area,” shown above in the center of the image, featuring the interconnected pattern of cards and the yellow pawn. There is the “draw area,” shown at the top of the above image, featuring the Airport deck and 4 face up cards. And finally there is the “ticket area," shown at the left side of the above image, featuring the Ticket deck, current in-play Ticket card, and 8-sided die.
The goal of the game is to complete as many Ticket cards as possible until failing to complete a Ticket. In this way, the game goes for a high score approach to gameplay. Ticket cards are considered successfully completed if you fly your airplane pawn to the first listed Airport card (picking up the passenger) and subsequently fly to the second listed Airport card (dropping off the passenger) within the allotted turn count. Every ticket card has a number of turns listed on it. This is the number of turns that the player has to complete that ticket card from the turn that they draw it. The turn count is shown by the face-up number on the 8-sided die.
In order to complete a Ticket card, the player has a handful of actions they may take on their turn. These actions involve flying the airplane pawn to a new location, placing a new Airport card from the draw area, or replacing unwanted cards in the draw area. On their turn, the player gets 2 action points to use. When they have used both of these action points, the turn counter decreases by 1. The specific available actions and their associated point values are as follows:
- 1 pt. – Move the Airplane pawn as far in any one direction as it can go, stopping when it reaches the end of a line of cards.
- 1 pt. – Stop the Airplane pawn’s flight early on a card of your choice within its flight path.
- 1 pt. – Play a new Airport card from the face-up cards in the draw area.
- 2 pts. – Remove 1 to 4 cards of your choosing from the draw area and replace them with new cards from the deck. Then, shuffle the replaced cards back into the deck.
Airport cards can only be played adjacent to an Airport card of its same color, as shown in the image above. The Airport card must match colors with adjacent Airports on every side to be considered legal. When a new Airport is played from the draw area, immediately flip over a new card to bring the number of face-up cards back up to 4.
When the Airplane pawn has successfully traveled from the first Airport on the player’s ticket to the second listed Airport, set aside that Ticket card and draw a new Ticket at the start of the next turn, placing it face up in the ticket area and resetting the die as indicated.
Special Cases
First Turn
On the first turn of the game, the player draws a Ticket card, sets the die as indicated, and then looks through the deck for both of the Airport cards listed on the Ticket. The first Airport is played as the starting card in the play area, and the second Airport is set face-up in the draw area. The Airport deck is then shuffled and 3 more cards are drawn and placed face-up in the draw area.
Pre-Played Ticket Locations
If a Ticket card is drawn and both locations listed on the Ticket have already been played, that Ticket card is shuffled back into the Ticket deck. Then, the player selects one line of one color of Airports, and shuffles all airports within that line back into the Airport deck. If the Airplane pawn is on one of these cards, it is moved to the nearest Airport card in play. Note that a line of Airport cards cannot be selected if it would break the connection between parts of the Airport chain. So in the image above, the blue line and the pink line could be shuffled into the deck, but the purple line and the green line could not. Then, a new Ticket card is drawn and play resumes. This is done in order to ensure that the player cannot play a large amount of Airport cards at the beginning of the game and spend the rest of it just flying around and finishing Tickets. The player must balance between movement and card-playing for the entire duration of the game.