Creating a Local Food Card Game: Family Fun and Learning

I’ve been working on a game with my kids recently. There are several reasons for this.

1. We’re game designers!
   • We like making games (both analog and digital)
   • Also, educationally, I know there are lots of benefits to designing games, too. Including problem-solving, creativity, IT skills, perseverance and even motor skills development (for younger kids).
2. I want the kids’ academic resumes to look as good as possible, and this is a two-birds-one-stone situation: I get to do what I like to do and do for a day job, and they get a good experience out of it¹.
3. I (again) want to model what my seminar students should or could be doing with games in society.
4. I like my city and want to be more involved in activities that promote it.

🍲 The game

The game idea was thought up during a car journey on a recent family trip after we talked about the runaway success of the Oji-san TCG. We thought it would be cool to create a card game to increase attention on our city. But, we clearly didn’t want to copy that existing game. So, we came up with the idea of doing a game to promote the soba noodle restaurants in the city (there are quite a few, one ‘famous’ one round the corner from us).

We made the game to be similar to Splendor (though much simpler… I think). An abbreviated version of the rules and gameplay follows:

• There are 11 restaurant cards.

• Restaurant cards have a recipe on them comprised of up to 5 of the following ingredients: Soba, Broth, Green onions, Tempura, Meat.
• The recipes reflect the menu that the actual restaurants are famous for (as much as possible anyway).
• The simpler the recipe, the fewer the victory points.
• Players have 5 ingredients cards in their hands, and draw one new ingredient at the start of their turn from an ingredients deck OR from the top of the players’ discard pile.

• At the start of the game, 3 restaurants are on show, which the players can ‘win’ if they have the suitable ingredients in hand.
  • I.e. if the restaurant’s menu is soba, broth, and green onions and you have them in hand, you can discard those ingredients to ‘win’ that restaurant.
• When a restaurant is won, a new one is brought out.
• Players draw up or discard down to 5 cards after their turn.
• Play continues until all the restaurants have been won, or players can’t make any of the recipes on show.

Gameplay reflection

We played two games of it yesterday and the balance was really good. I won by one point (22 to 23), and then my son won 15 to 18². The game works! That is the most important thing. It was not as complex as Splendor and finishes quite quickly (around 10 minutes) which I think is a decent enough length.

Having played it though, we are already contemplating adding special abilities. The ingredients cards could have some ‘gotcha’ elements which will also help alleviate the situation where your hand is full of the same ingredient. For example, the soba card could be discarded to exchange a card in your hand with your opponent, the meat card could let you go through the discard deck and search for a card of your choice, etc.

So how does this connect to promoting our city?

As mentioned, each of the recipe cards is an actual soba noodle restaurant in our city.

Details include:

• Name
• Victory Points
• Location
• Flavor text (a little blurb about the restaurant)
• A coupon for a discount on a menu item (red text)
• A place to collect a stamp from the restaurant

The idea here is that you buy a set of the cards (probably from the city hall). The restaurant cards all have a discount coupon on them. When you take the card to the restaurant, you can collect a signature or stamp from the owners to receive the discount. This doubles up to two extra things: 1) it works as a way to show that you have used the discount (so you can’t do it again) and, 2) with the stamp, you can “win” this restaurant during gameplay with one less ingredient than is needed (acting as a bonus for gameplay). Finally, in the case of the Oji-san card game, maybe some people will enjoy collecting the signatures/stamps…?

Next steps

🎨 Design elements

We need to polish up the game a little.

• As mentioned, adding in some special abilities to the ingredients cards so that the game is a bit more dynamic.
• We also need to change the layout of the cards themselves. For instance, there are only one of each of the ingredients on the cards, so we can remove the “1.”
• Also, I think the name of the restaurant should be more prominent.
• We could also add photos of the owners… That might be cool.

🏙 City hall pitch

We need to make a pitch deck, and get this in front of someone (I’m not exactly sure who) at Moriya city office. I’m possibly meeting with a local politician in the coming days/weeks, so we’ll see what they say.

So what do you think?

If you’ve read this far, what do you think? Have you experienced something like this with your own children? Tried pitching a game to your local government or council? What was it like? Would you like to play our game?

Thanks for reading!

1. Regarding point 2, this is very much a Japan thing, I think? I’m not sure though. From what I hear, the US is also super competitive academically, and students care a lot about their extracurriculars in order to look good on college applications. ↩︎
2. I used ChatGPT to help me figure out the number of ingredients cards to include, which seems to have worked well! ↩︎