Project

Schrift Stadt

Description

Whilst studying in Weimar, we were given an unusual brief to create our own boardgame. Placed into groups, the class was expected to design and build a piece of work that acted as a functioning game, whilst fulfilling the practical purpose of educating the players about typography. My group consisted of Floyd (a fellow Englishman), Tom (from Ireland), Hans, Antonia (both from Weimar) and myself. Overcoming our geographical differences and language barriers, we combined our creative minds and formed a team, the likes of which has never been seen before, and will likely never be seen again.

An extensive planning period probably helped us to achieve such a fully-formed final piece. We tirelessly discussed and experimented with different approaches and concepts for several weeks before committing ourselves to the design process. The final product was Schrift Stadt (which more or less translates as Type Town), a game aimed at design students just as ourselves, that helped teach the players the basics of typography, whilst being a hell of a lot of fun to play.

The game was played much like Trivial Pursuit, running in a circular motion with the players collecting coloured counters upon answering various questions or completing a particular task. The colour coding defined which question would be asked and the reward for a right answer was one of the tokens. A completed set of tokens meant the player could then progress into the center circle and complete the game. We made the locations and themes relevant to the city, as we decided the game could be adapted for different cities, just like Monopoly. There were literally hundreds of questions in the end, and seeing as we hand-made the entire game and all its many components, construction was a very long and difficult and expensive procedure. Our efforts were more than worth it though, as the end product was a beautifully refined piece of design work.