#52GameDesignChallenge - Week 1 - Niimura Station

As those of you who follow me on Twitter are aware, I've started a weekly game design challenge with the intention of designing 52 games in one year. I've also committed to trying to be active on Twitter during the development of each to generally work on my social media skills.

For those who don't follow me on Twitter, by the way, this is a thing I'm doing. This post is about the first game in that hopefully very successful series of games.


I plan to have each game in the challenge have some sort of randomized element that I have to include in some way. For the first challenge that random element was a random Wikipedia article. Well, technically three random articles that I then put on a poll on Twitter. An article on Niimura Station won the poll.

Now, on to the game.

Niimura Station

In short Niimura Station is a solitaire (1 player) game about running a small train station in Japan for one day. It is loosely based on the station of the same name. And I mean very loosely. It is a very small station and if I'd kept close to the reality of the station I think I would have had a very dull game.

In terms of gameplay, it is basically what I would call a casualty management game. Bad things constantly happen and you try to keep the bad things under control. In this case, the "bad things" are the needs of people traveling through your station. If you can't keep them under control they will become disgruntled, which is bad because it may end up costing you money. And you need money to pay for the stations' upkeep, which gets increasingly difficult as the game goes on and you activate more things in an attempt to keep those travelers happy long enough for their train to arrive.

I'm rather proud of how it turned out, so I hope you all try it out and enjoy it.

HERE ARE THE PRINT AND PLAY FILES