Cardboard Kaiju is a community engagement and capacity building program that consists of a series of workshops that focus on skills development and creative collaboration.
The Cardboard Kaiju game was first developed in 2017 as part of the One Last Apocalypse Program and it was experienced as a collaborative life size board game experience.
Taking on the feedback from 2017, The Edge redeveloped the game in 2018 as a table top version with sound and animation elements. Below is the process that was taken, detailing both the public and outreach programs that occurred.
After this process there is now a game kit that you can download from this wiki with all you need to play the game in your community!
This kit can be remixed so that you can work with your community to design your town. For example you could add design elements to the Kaiju, replace the river with an iconic landmark in your community and re-design the buildings to reflect your community. Or you can play the game as is along with other collaborative games and run it as a game night series. (The Edge did this in 2017 as part of the One Last Apocalypse program- see here……One Last Apocalypse)
Here you will find the initial program notes from the Edge Lead, Daniel Flood. from daniel
• Engage with diverse communities.
• Professional development opportunity for emerging facilitators.
• Promote State Library Resources to new and existing audiences.
• To develop a kit for other libraries to download and use/adjust from the wiki
Engage community
Engage with community through our diverse and inclusive public programs.
Engage with and deliver programs for the CALD community and people with disability
Build capacity
Enable digitally inclusive, literate communities that are skilled for the 21st century.
The program will be delivered over 3 months at The Edge. There will be a public program component as well as an outreach component that will engage young people from flexi schools.
This was a series of engagements conducted with participants from local Flexischools, with an intention to use the Kaiju game development as a vehicle for introducing a range of digital and design skills to young people.
This page (outreach sessions) describes the overall delivery details and lesson plans used when this program was
Individual skill development sessions include:
This was a parallel series of engagements with members of the public, using the assets produced by the Outreach Sessions described above, as well as new material, to develop a working prototype of a Cardboard Kaiju board game.
A local game designer, Dylan Shearer will deliver the game redevelopment. Cardboard Kaiju 1.0 used a card based resolution mechanic loosely adapted from other people's mechanics. This go around we're looking at engaging with Dylan, a game designer to create something a little more bespoke and reflective that this is a board game.
* Game mechanics files files from game design sessions
Last year the buildings were 3D mounted on large hexagonal game pieces for assembling the city. Buildings (and the Kaiju) were human sized (1.5 - 2.5 m high), and an auditorium was available for the play. This presented some issues regards time to fabrication, complexity in fabrication and (comparative) expense in materials. Moving into this iteration we will be looking at 2/2.5D and tabletop size so that it easier to cut and cheaper if you wanted to go full scale.
The design process for this project is already solid. We are looking more at the graphics and how to pack up the game for community publishing.
How other libraries could run Cardboard kaiju Future