Creating strategies and gamification of tours

In Loquiz there is one special game type called Strategy. This is a very powerful way to build linear tours or games where a team’s next location depends on the answer of the previous question. Strategy games work well for smaller and medium sized groups.
In this post I will explain the strategy from the basics and to some really advanced stuff.

What is strategy?

Strategy is a rule set that defines for every question what question opens next depending on if the previous answer was correct or incorrect. To build a strategy you will define for every single question in your game what point activates next if the answer was correct or incorrect. It is done graphically in Loquiz and works for scavenger hunts, scenario games but also if you want it to work as tours app.

Default strategy for the 5-question game looks like this.

To explain it, every time a player answers correctly they get to move to the next point. Except the last point where answering correctly finishes the game. Every time a player answers incorrectly they move back to previous location. Except question number one, where they just need to answer that question again. It keeps opening until they get it right and move to next.

Strategy for tours

Lets assume you want to gamify a tour where players start from 1 and move all the way to the last point.
In this scenario, you can build the following strategy.

In this scenario players will get the same question again until they get it right. So effectively you push players to find out as much as possible about any given location and they can move on only when they get the answer right.

Remember that “story” or “no-answer” type of questions only have one type of outcome. When a player pushes OK, it is considered the correct answer and they would move on instantly.

You could also build the following strategy.

In this scenario players would move on regardless of if they got the answer correct or not. Both options move player to the next location.

Gamifying your tours

Tour strategies were just a mechanical way of moving people around. If you want to gamify it a bit more, you can create the following strategy; if players answer correctly, they get to go to the next secret location. In the event of a wrong answer, they skip the cool “secret place”. In the next
sample case, answering 1 correctly will take you to “2”, but answering
incorrectly will push you to 3.

Or vice versa -if they get the answer right they get to skip the next location and go directly to the next big one. Answering wrong would take you to some additional assignment. Just switch green and red lines from previous screenshot.

One final note

By now you are probably wondering  what happens if any given location is not accessible. Will this break the game? It would break the game if it were lacking one important feature. This feature is called “Open Question Now” or “FastForward”. This allows a team to open the next question without actually physically going there on landscape.
One penalty point is added for using this option in the game. You as a game designer can limit “OQN”, so that people are forced to go to the majority of the places. Keeping this option unlimited adds the cool strategic decision into the game of when and if to use it.

I hope you can now gamify your tours!  In the next post I will describe how to build true strategy puzzles and “Snakes and Ladders” in real life.