As part of a school project we had to create a family game around a theme we could choose ourselves.

After some brainstorming we ended up with the theme: "prevent wasting energy around the house".

 

First of all we took a closer look at the average Belgian family and started taking notes on their behaviour and their habits. Based on that information we came to the conclusion that the main reasons of wasting energy were nonchalant things like leaving the lights on or leaving a door wide open. 

Eventually we found that the big challenge to creating the game was to have children have fun doing things they would otherwise never bother to do or just plainly forget and to get the parents to participate (and not just for 30 minutes...).

 

Eventually we came up with "Het Huis van Verspilling" or the wasteful house in English.

The point of the game was to recreate the layout of your house with the pieces according to "waste potential".

Meaning, the higher the amount of ways to waste energy, the bigger the pieces are.

Once that's done the point is to conquer rooms, and eventually the whole house by catching someone wasting energy (open doors, leaving the tv on, ...).

Once you've conquered a room you can enforce a rule of your choosing. For example: everytime someone enters that room, they have to bow down to you.

 

Because the game would take roughly a week to play out, we had to make sure the game interface wouldn't get in the way of everyday life. 
We solved that problem by making the game interface out of Velcro and embedded magnets into it so that you can hang the board vertically without the pieces falling off.

 

 

 

 

Since the game was about not wasting anything we designed the packaging to be as efficient as possible. 

Therefor we used the game interface as part of the packaging and used a minimum of packaging material as possible.