Cranky Critters Board Game

Cranky Critters
3 min readNov 2, 2021

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We’ve all had one of those days where nothing goes right!
You start off fine, but pretty soon the tables turn and the world is telling you “haha…not today”. Maybe you lose your wallet and then your keys, and then you drop your phone coming out of the car. Finally at some point you just lose your shit.

Is there a bright side? Well, what makes a shitty day better? Is it the love and warmth of your friends?… Yeah right! It’s seeing someone else having a worse day! It’s like pushing a buddy off a cliff so he can break your fall when you get pushed by someone else. We’ve all been there, right? Right?!

Basically, how bad can your day get before you completely flip out!

Concrete game design

Initially, we all sat down and brainstormed using some of our favorite board game elements for inspiration. We set out to see how they could fit with our concept.

Identity

Adversity affects each person differently; we want this to translate to our critters as well. Each critter plays differently than the next, in personality & traits as well as abilities.

Rng without dice

High replay value is key for us, so every round feels different. Changing win conditions and random events are nice, but we want to take it as far as to include a randomly generated playing board!

Basic flow

You will go about your day, completing tasks which keep you sane — but also take you out into the world that seems to hate you. It won’t be easy because at every turn something new will go wrong. Sacrifices have to be made to get through the day, but be careful! You’re losing your cool all the while.

The endgame

Just having a shitty day isn’t a game, being the last one standing in the shittiest of days is! As events unfold, you become angrier which makes your abilities stronger. If you tip the scale and flip out, game over! (We’re workshopping a mechanic to keep disqualified players participating in the game to sabotage the remaining players)

An open design

Once we decided on building in the NFT space, we realized the open-ness of potential for this project. There will be many great ideas to fit in the original design, so we will make sure future expansions can be added to the base game. We’re planning with an open design so future sets can be used, but won’t affect the base game’s structure. Expansions could include new critters, new locations, themed event cards and even a new board set.

Over the next weeks we’ll be able to share more details about the specific mechanics, game design and exclusives you can expect in the game! We hope you are as excited as we are. Stay tuned!

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Cranky Critters
Cranky Critters

Written by Cranky Critters

An NFT collection of 6,000 Cranky Critters Anger symbol. Creating a Cranky Critters Board game.