Forever Soup | Lead Game Designer
Forever Soup is a 4 player collaborative analog card game where players try to keep the pot of soup going in a game version of a perpetual stew. If the players win the game, they leave the pot exactly how they left it for the next set of players to come and play! This project was created in a 6 person team over the course of four months for Bradley University’s FUSE 2024 showcase. In this game, I was the team’s lead game designer and playtester.
Designing with Fuse in Mind
As this game was explicitly designed for FUSE 2024, we were able to know exactly how our players would be interacting with our game – we would be running the game, after all. This meant we were able to make some very specific gameplay choices when designing the game. The most important one (in my opinion) is the choice we made very early on in development to not reset the game.
After you win a game of Forever Soup, the pot (or the playing area) is kept the exact same for the next set of players to play it. If you lose, the pot is reset – giving the players some stakes that we couldn’t get otherwise. Players simply wouldn’t be able to play the game long enough to put a stake in the game.
This design choice only works if we subtly help the players win. If the win percentage – on average – is 50/50, the pot would only be going for a couple of games at most before being lost. When the game was brought to FUSE, our average new player win percentage was around 80%, helping our chances of keeping a pot going throughout FUSE much more likely.
Challenging Ingrained Habits
Forever Soup is a game based on collaborating with your other players. Players play with their hands revealed and oftentimes make gameplay decisions to set up for the next player’s turn. This was the first time I had ever designed a game like this, so it was quite a challenge to figure out.
I think one of the biggest breakthroughs came when we realized that we can have players play with their hands revealed. I’m an avid Magic: the Gathering player, so every time I pick up a hand of cards in any card game I want to hide them from my opponents. This unconscious habit dissuaded me from even considering playing with revealed hands until we had a blind playtest and we saw that that’s what people were leaning towards. Nowhere in the rulebook that we gave the playtesters did it say to play with hands revealed or not – it just felt natural to them.
To be honest, it still doesn’t feel natural to me, but when we showed it off at FUSE people loved being able to see what their teammates were working with. I guess it’s as they say – you are the world’s shittiest playtester for your game!