Sevens-An empathy building game

Need

In social service education, empathy-building is an important topic, since when students are going to provide social service, they need to know the real needs of people. The basement to understand other people's real needs is having empathy for them. For example, if we want to provide social service for people in poverty, without empathy, we may say that they only need money. However, if we can build empathy before getting in touch with them, we may pay attention to their deep thoughts, relationships, emotions. So empathy-building is necessary for social service education.

Design Description

The game Sevens is an offline role-play game with cards, somehow like a TRPG game. The core idea is to make players experience the life of people in poverty and then build empathy for them. 

Players will organize into different groups, each group replace for a "family", so players in each group will get a family role, like father, mother, or grandpa. They have their own work need to do, or it can be said they have different life skills. Players need to try their best to survive for seven days based on their life skills. That's why this game called Sevens.

MDA

The mechanics for this game is not complex, players only have five types of actions: discuss strategy, make choice, roll dice, do the things on the cards, distribute food and water in the family.

Discuss strategy: since different roles have different life skills but their goal is the same, so players need to discuss how to achieve the goal by using these skills.

Make choice: each day, players have limited action points, so they need to make choice that who should take action.

Roll dice: the most results of action are happened by rolling dice, different number replace different things and results, some are good, some are not so good.

Do the things on the cards: to make players experience living in poverty, the cards will have some things that players need to do before getting the result.

Distribute food and weather in the family: after one day's hard work, each family will get some food and water, but usually, it's not enough for every member, so they need to discuss how to distribute.

How to play it

Since the original idea for this game is a physical and offline role-playing game, so it's hard to play online. So I create several docs and find some tools to make it as playable as it can. If you want to play, you can follow these steps:

1. Read the rules of this game in this google doc, it concludes the detailed rule for the game; https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qHVunBg5n4FMipBYmmpYlcOQGG7dVqU0b-woBTqj3q4/...

2. Open the card collection PPT, for different types of cards, there are a different number of cards; https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1AsVguErZ06PuvP-XxnfDH6SvxpamHW3i0BLbc66L...

3. The game is designed for 6-8 players, I know it's hard to call together so many people, so you need to play all the family roles by yourself and make choice alone.

4. Using the online pick wheel to replace dice, when you need to roll dice, use this tool. https://pickerwheel.com/tools/random-number-generator/

5. On the card PPT's second page, there is a chart that records the food and water you get from different actions, update the chart after each action.

6. After all the actions for one day, distribute the food and water for each family role.

7. Repeat the step 4-6 for seven times, try your best to make all the family members survive.