‘The Outback Way’ to a 90% Mark

By Brooklyn Aitken

Our group project was titled The Outback Way. It was a fairly simple linear moving boardgame that took a lot of inspiration from the (also boardgame) Tokiado. Our game involved going from Perth Australia and moving to Cairns. The group consisted of Dylan Brummel, Max Williamson, and Richard Liu. The division of labour was Dylan handling mechanics and themes, Max was in charge of board design and did the prestation at the end, And Richard worked on marketing and playtesting. 

https://dylanbgameexperience.wordpress.com – Dylan

https://maverickwillomax.wordpress.com/ – Max

https://epicmoviereviews369067971.wordpress.com/2022/05/13/my-role-in-the-outback-way/ – Richard

For anyone wondering about Tokiado the game we based ours off: Tokaido was designed by Antoine Bauza and was released in 2012. In the game, each player is traversing the ‘East sea road’, one of the most important roads of Japan. As it connects two of the largest cities. While traveling, you meet people, eat traditional meals, collect souvenirs, collect cards to complete the panoramas, and visit temples, all to gain the most points and therefore win. The more things you do/buy the more points you gather and the more likely you are to win. 

Tokaido doesn’t have much narrative which in some senses can be good, you don’t have to worry about what this character says about you, or whether or not you connect with them. This left me feeling a bit empty though, where is the drama? when I played the game I was telling people that my character moonlighted as a samurai because I really wanted some backstory. As creative writing student that makes sense. I wanted to know why these people were traveling cross country and what shenanigans these characters could get into. This is why I expanded on the characters the way I did. I decided to not only conceptualise our characters but also to make a few come to life by cosplaying as them. The two I picked were The Runaway Bride and The Youtuber. The YouTuber was a bit easier, I wanted to give 2015 tumblr hipster vibes, hence the aviators and felt hat. I didn’t want to spend a large amount of money though and so I started looking for wedding dresses in op-shops, the one closer to my house was so small that it maybe would have fitted on my thigh, shout out to child brides though, I guess. It was 120 dollars and that included a veil but there was no way it would fit so I went to another op-shop. This one had one that would fit me but was 140 dollars which was out of my budget. I spent the next few days contacting people as well as other op shops and looking online but unfortunately, I had to buy the dress… Then they made me buy a carry bag!

So all together I spent about 235 dollars. Whilst that is a lot of money to spend, I do think I looked really good, and I believes demonstrates how seriously I took it this and my role of establishing narrative and characters. If given the choice I would probably do it again despite being strapped for cash for the next fortnight, but I also I’d probably look into a few more op-shops a bit further out of my way.

The group decided to simply make the bonuses that each character can get copies of the ones seen in Tokaido. We felt making a completely new point system would have been very time consuming and would have had to been play tested multiple times.

We also wanted to make the game a bit more challenging so there are also bonuses along the way that specific characters need to stop at to get a large amount of points (eg: there is a space where The Youtuber can make an apology video and they get an extra 20 points for this). This is based off the bonus stars that are given in ‘Mario Party’ but we also wanted some control so you can block other players from being able to stop there by stopping there yourself, but you cannot get the points.