Trapped in a maze there isn’t anything more embarrassing for a mage. You just wanna get out of there before the other mages do. But to do that you must learn new spells. Be careful though mages aren’t the nicest kind of people so watch out what the other mages are skimming and make sure you get out of there first.

Maze Mages is a board/card game where the main goal is to get a certain amount of points before your enemies. Make use of the changing board and cards to win the game before your enemies get the change. Because it is embarrassing for a mage if somebody else escapes a maze before them.

Screenshots

How to play

My input

Most of this project I did by myself. Only for the art on the cards, I took some illustration Designs from the internet as well for the mages. I did this so that I could focus more on the design and the changes that I made to make the game more balanced.

Design

For this game, I got mostly inspired by games like a betrayal at the house of the hill and munchkin. What I liked about these games is that you have a rivalry and friendly relationship with the other players at the same time. By betrayal, at the house of the hill, nobody knows at the start who is going to betray not even the betrayer. So at first, you try to keep everyone well equipped until everyone finds out who is the enemy. By munchkin, you help people in exchange for treasure and items. Until somebody reaches a high level then everyone cooperates to destroy the player with the highest level.

At the start of my design, I was mainly focused on the concept of the house of the betrayal board and the equipment of munchkins. You start with a very small room where you have to explore the map at random to find treasures to make you stronger. The betrayer also knows at the start of the game that he is the betrayer. Sometimes the room can change by effects where you can land on. Like switching 2 tiles or 1 tile while rotating a certain degree. Sometimes you come on a tile where you must give a weapon to an opponent. By testing, I noticed that sometimes the betrayer had to make some actions for his benefit but then was easily spotted by other players, and if the betrayer is spotted early then the game is over very soon.

I decided to scrap the idea of a betrayer and make everyone fight for their own. I changed the game a lot and also scrapped equipment because the balancing of the equipped items wasn’t fair now the equipped items are changed to spells every time you end your turn you draw 1 spell card you can decide to play them right away or keep it in your hand so that you can make a better strategy.

Every player must have a certain amount of points (red, blue, white, and black) to escape the maze. Every player needs different kinds of points based on the color that they picked but the total amount of points that they need is the same.

The maze also changed a bit instead of randomly entering rooms the maze is now open to see. The challenge now is to use spells to make the maze so that it is to your advantage instead of your opponents.

The cards were the hardest part of the design since I had to tweak them after every playtest. Some cards were just too powerful and some cards did too little. Also, some players used some strategies by combining cards that I hadn’t even thought about. Even though the tweaking was very hard it was very fun to do because you try to get in the players had and how well combos could work for them.

For me, this game always has an unfinished feeling because sometimes cards can still feel overpowered or terrible depending on the situation. If people have enough cards the board’s strategies feel underwhelming because the players can use their cards to fix the maze easily in their favors. I’ve tweaked a lot of the design but if I were to work on this project again I think I will try to scrap the board and focus more on the cards.