Hot Air
go fast, blow hard
Physical game developed Spring 2015.
Role:
Game Designer
Project Status:
Complete
Every game of hot air starts in a bar, where you the player are boasting about your high flying adventures of daring do and about how you are the greatest airship captain to ever grace the sky. When who should walk in but your greatest rival, the other legendary airship captain with their repertoire of swashbuckling stories and cunning escapes. From here a bet goes down. The winner of a race around the world will be hailed as the true greatest captain up in the clear blue. But there is a catch. See at some point one of you said you could win even if you had the worst crew imaginable. And the other took you up in that. Now you must pick your opponents crew and deal with the hand you are dealt.
Hot Air is a one-on-one collectible card game where players captain an airship in a race against the elements, the other captain, and most of all your own crew. In Hot Air you are not building your own deck, you are building your opponents deck, and it is up to you to try to give them the most counter productive crew you can think up. Think you can win a race when your ship is crewed by a tribe of feral children? What about a crew of ghosts, or perhaps a lazy cook and his army of living vegetable? Find out who is the true king of the skies in Hot Air.
It is easy to see why we got so excited about this game. The theme alone carries it and the idea of building a horrible deck for someone else is fun and its own strange and backward design problem. Designing Hot Air was quite the challenge. I knew that if when people drew their hand they laughed at it and shook their head we were heading in the right direction. However I knew we had arrived when people drew their terrible hand and then found really strange and roundabout ways of making really bad cards work for them.
Hot Air taught me to playtest, and then playtest more, and then playtest again. I quickly lost the critical distance on the project, so it was only through other people's eyes that I could see how fun our game really was.