Now Hiring: Shadow Government

tabletop gamedev
Now Hiring: Shadow Government

Table of Contents

This is a list of all the sections in this post. Click on any of them to jump to that section.

Premise

Play as job recruiters in the shadow government competing to get your cohorts hired; you must stop at no end to do so — even if it means digging up dirt on your coworkers applicants.

Contributions

Now Hiring: Shadow Government was created as part of a class project with a team of 4 students, including myself.

I took on the role of the usability lead for the project, conducting player studies, recording usability and playability issues, and creating solutions with the rest of the team.

Additionally, I contributed to many other areas of the game’s development including:

  • Content creation: character, liability, and prompt card text
  • Rules writing: I worked on the initial rules text and made edits with playtest data
  • Initial ideation and design: see below for more info

Initial Ideation

The original premise for Now Hiring: Shadow Government was a trolley problem oriented game where players had to resolve moral dilemmas with a cast of zany characters.

Initial testing showed that players didn’t care much for the railroad map and trolley plot, but they were very invested in the humourous character cards.

We made the decision early on to switch tracks and remove the trolley aspect altogether, while focusing more heavily on the character driven improv-style narrative.

Ultimately, we landed on a job recruiting game, including a large “You’re Hired” stamp for added immersion.