Tweaking Ancient Games

So we were tasked with tweaking one of the three ancient games we played in class, and I went ahead picking Senet as I liked it the most out of the three games of old.

My first iteration was to remove the sticks movement mechanic as it was kinda confusing, and to simply replace them with a dice number one to six for the player to move round, which was to say the least highly sucessful.

While I added in a battle mechanic to make the game more engaging, and of course to bring alittle bit of the competive side out. While developing this mechanic and giving it a test run with people I ran into a few problems.

During my second iteration I fixed the problem by only allowing the players to fight one piece, if they do not have the same amount of pieces their opponent has on the same square. Its only when they both have the equal amount they fight all whatever number they have one that square. It was sucessful after having people replay it again.

On the third iteration I removed most of the Egyptian symbols on the board, but to only replace them with new ones that kept the spiritual (Death and afterlife) aspect of the game. I moved them to different locations on the board to make things more interesting. Though of course I found a problem within these symbols I placed down onto this playing field.

The next iteration was the fourth where I deicded some cards had to be created or the Anubis judge of the scales would completely be irrelevant, and the Ankh Eternal life symbol would be really game breaking. So if the player answered correctly he would gain eternal life for one turn so that no players would be able to kill their piece. As for Anubis if you answer correctly you can enter the afterlife, but answer wrong your soul is destoryed and you're sent to the Second Life symbol (Near the beginning of the game).

After test running this it was sucessful.