High Concept

College Food Challenge (CFC) works against the phenomenon of weight-gain among college freshmen by educating players about healthy lifestyle decisions and translating caloric intake into weight gain. Players traverse the game board, collecting food and counteracting weight gain with good behaviors. Each turn, an event happens to the player that requires him or her to gain more food cards–and therefore, more weight–or learn new behaviors. This event also determines the player’s movement across the board. By the end, players will have learned about how many pounds they gain from various foods and what daily activities they can enact in order to keep themselves from gaining too much weight.

Player Experience Goals

It’s easy for college students, especially freshmen to change their diet habits and gain weight due to the change of environment or academic pressure. The goal of CFC is to help college students to learn more about the foods they eat everyday, as well as what physical exercises are necessary and helpful in order to lead a healthy life.

Game Details

College Food Challenge is a board game that will teach students how to use strategy in order to successfully blend their knowledge of good and bad foods with situations in everyday life.

CFC is a turn based game that allows for complete player interaction as they should read their events cards out loud, which will create a fun interactive game flow.

This game is created as a learning tool, but it is also created for players to have fun as well. Without the situation of chance, players cannot successfully learn how to deal with the challenging situations that the game creates.

Credits

College Food Challenge was created by Bob Brewer, Jason Brown, Lisa Eldred, and Yi Ma for Michigan State University’s Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media course, TC830: Foundations of Serious Game Design, taught by Professor Carrie Heeter, Fall 2008.