aaron vanderbeek

Opportunities is a board game prototype that I came up with as a response to my day long experience at the Nemacolin resort in south western Pennsylvania, in which we were presented with a number of different events that we could participate in but were only allowed to select a few from the list.

The game was designed to highlight the opportunities that are presented to people and the choices we make when presented with a vast number of choices. Choosing of the opportunities and the consequences of them are greatly influenced by the past experience of individuals, and that people are capable of accomplishing more when others are willing to help them or work together.

The players are given complete freedom as to where to start, which direction to move, and which opportunities to pursue. They are however limited to moving a single space per turn, as we are all only human after all. Each player is free to explore and attempt to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible, that is until there are none remaining at which point the game is over!

The opportunities are presented in the form of colored squares, whose color indicates their relative familiarity and consequence to each player. Every color is worth a different amount to each player, and consequently the difficulty in acheiving those opportunites varies for each player as well. All of these relationships are dictated on each player's individual score card.

The teamwork mechanic allows players to help other players attain difficult opportunities that are easier for themselves. By sharing an opportunity with another player, both players can attempt that opportunity using the more experienced player's probability. While helping another player may benefit another person more than yourself in the short team, it is easy to see that teamwork is the fastest way to get ahead in Opportunities.

The range of opportunities available on the board go from the completely safe but low reward, to the high risk high reward to allow players to pursue multiple strategies during a single game. They always have the choice to take advantage of their current opportunity or not, perhaps choosing to wait for another player to come help them out. Once the opportunities are depleted the scores are tallied based off of how many successful opportunites were obtained by each player, which can vary greatly depending on how much the players took advantage of teamwork.