Augmenting Suburbia Guidelines for making computer-augmented tabletop games easier to learn

Abstract

The goal of this thesis is to investigate how computer-augmented tabletop games and games in general can become easier to learn. This has been done by designing, implementing and user testing a prototype of a CATG, Augmented Suburbia. This prototype is a CATG-implementation of the tabletop game Suburbia. Based on the experience of creating and user testing Augmented Suburbia, twelve guidelines for how to design CATGs that are easy to learn have been developed. In addition, concepts that show how the guidelines can be used have been designed. In the future, these guidelines need to be validated through actual usage. While the guidelines were created with CATGs in mind, another future direction is to investigate to what extent they are applicable to game design in general.