Word Traveler

About Word Traveler

Word Traveler, designed by Thomas Dagenais-Lespérance and published by Office Dog (an Asmodee North America studio), has you and your friends visiting an exciting new city. By communicating with your travel companions, you will work together to tour the city over the course of a 2-day trip.

Each game is played on one of the four city board grids: New York, London, Tokyo, or Paris. You recieve a secret map card, indicating the interesting locations around the city you want to visit. However, you can only tell other players the route you want to take by using word cards and pointing directions, much like a tourist with limited knowledge of the local language. Plan your routes individually, then work together to interpret each other's clues.

Project Overview:

When Brieger Creative started work on Word Traveler, the game foundation was already quite strong. Our work confirmed our initial assessment, the game was already very fun and didn't need any reworking of fundamental systems or massive changes, other than shortening the excessive playtime, which ran 60-80 minutes in early drafts. The remaining development focused on streamlining rule explanations and edge cases, useability of game interactions and components, and content.

There are 165 word cards in the game which are used by a player to clue in others to a specific image space on the board. Each word card has "word" on one side, and the same word with "Not" on the other side. Clues can be combined, so for example a player might play "Busy" and "Not Comfortable" for clues to the image of a Subway Car.

The original delivered word cards had issues including: different forms of phrasing and inconsistency, only applying to a particular image, being too broad or vague by applying to most images, repetitive of other words in the set, or seeming too technical or required specialized knowledge. Brieger Creative came up with guidelines for the word list, typically using adjectives that could be used in the form of "This location is [word]" and "This location is not [word]". Using these guidelines, we revised or cut many existing word cards and added new ones.

Services Provided:

Case Study: Playtime Reduction

A major issue of the early design was game length. The original 3-round game was regularly running at 60+ minutes to play. This was far too long for games of this style and the target demographic of more casual and family gamers. Despite the gameplay being highly rated, players often felt a loss of excitement and engagement by the end of it. Reactions were often "That was fun but I'm done for now", where they needed to be "That was amazing, let's play again right now!".

At the most basic level, a game with rounds can be made shorter in three ways: Fewer rounds, shorter rounds, or reducing setup and game procedure time. Working together with the team at Office Dog and the game's designer, we set to capture what made the game so great in an all-around faster format.

After much exploration and testing, we recommended changing the 3-round game into a 2-round game. Round 1 was kept less complex with clearer initial choices and a shorter possible route, while Round 2 provided great escalation and a sense of progress by allowing players to make longer riskier routes worth more points. The number of steps per player route was reduced overall to improve pacing and reduce complexity. A sand timer was added in the planning phase to shave unnecessary minutes and add tension. Throughout the game, rules and interactions were streamlined to make elements of the game quicker to comprehend and perform.

Brieger Creative Team