Travel Game PODCAST

The host of a podcast interviews her mother, Martha Motley, who is an educator and a mom of two. They discuss the topic of creativity and innovation and how it can be applied to board game design. The mother plans to create a travel-oriented board game that introduces players to different cultures and places around the world. The game will include facts about each location, and players will have to answer questions about the culture to progress in the game. The goal is to visit and mark off all the places on a map in order to win. The mother wants the game to be educational and enjoyable for both kids and adults. She also plans to create unique game pieces representing different modes of transportation. The podcast ends with the host expressing excitement about creating the game and her gratitude to her mother for being a guest on the show. Welcome back listeners. Thank you for tuning into the Motley Crue's first ever podcast. My goal is to explore a variety of different topics with an overall goal to broaden our horizons as a society. This is a special episode for my first special guest I've ever had on the show. I will have my mother actually, Martha Motley, if you would like to introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Martha Motley. I'm a wife and a mom of two kids and an educator. I'm glad to be here. Thank you for being on the show. Thank you for coming. Today, I was going to touch on a topic. I've got a class that I'm taking right now, Creativity and Innovation. In this class, I've learned a whole lot more about just broadening the scopes and trying to imagine things, create things that maybe don't exist. Maybe there's problems that need solving or maybe just wacky things that you might not always think about on the surface, but you dig deep and you can find. Maybe you can have some enjoyment. Right, exactly. Cross some enjoyment. Right now, my assignment I've been looking forward to is creating a game, a board game, which you and I both know in our family, it's a big thing. We love board games. What's your favorite board game? I love Monopoly, but we have a lot of games here. I think Mindshift is really fun because it allows you to change it up and kind of create your own board. That's a lot of fun. What's the key of that game? With that one, you're trying to get across a maze, but the maze keeps changing, so you can shift the piece, not just the playing pieces, but also the board itself. Right, the board moves, which is a really cool concept. It is a cool concept. What game are you thinking about? My game is going to be travel-oriented. I wanted to do something that not only was just fun, family-oriented, but could also be taken as a little lesson to dig into different cultures, different aspects, ways of life. I know you've traveled the U.S. a little bit. You were pretty young, but you've been to Canada and Mexico when you were a baby, but you haven't really traveled much outside of that. What kinds of areas are you thinking? I don't remember much of that either. These areas, I was thinking on a world scope. I'd love to have big travel places that people can just look at and be like, oh, yeah, I love that. I see people go there all the time. I'm thinking Paris, France, or Tokyo, Japan, just different places all over the world, all over the globe. I know you remember this. The first time we ever went to Disney as a family, I know I was a whole lot younger, actually. I remember our trip to Epcot, which is where I got a lot of this idea. When you go further into the park at Disney, you will find yourself feeling like you were in a completely different place other than Orlando, Florida. They've got Norway, Mexico. Yeah, Rhode Island area. Everything you can think of, just a few footsteps away, you walk into a different town. Every time you look around, you find yourself in all these different places. They've got people dressed up as that culture. They've got the food. They've got the games, the activities. That did give me a lot of inspiration for the way I could implement travel into the game. Just thinking about what other fun aspects can you bring to the culture itself. Yeah, when you were little, I don't know if you remember this, but you and Maddie had a passport that you took with you to each country. They would stamp it. There were some activities that you could do. Exactly, which is very similar to what we're doing here, just on a smaller scale for people to be able to enjoy in their living rooms. I know that this is a board game, but you always have the option nowadays to be able to link a QR code or some type of digital piece to this. Is that something that you're interested in, or do you really want to stick to the board game? I could. I also have been thinking about my market group. I know that that might hit some people, but I don't want to leave out people that may not be as much into phones or may not be into that type of technology aspect. I want them to be able to enjoy the game just as much. Maybe just put the fact they're on the board, they're on cards. That way they're able to have access to it right there on the spot and not having other things outside of the game in order to enjoy it. That makes sense. What other places do you think you might want to have included? I know you've mentioned a couple. I want places that not only are spread out amongst the globe, but just kind of represent completely different ways of living. I know I mentioned Norway from Disney, but I really love that one. It was always kind of snowy there. You know it from a lot of movies. I know Frozen kind of took place in that area. Just different places like that. You've got a snowy place. You can kind of see it on the map in the board game. It's got snow. It's got a nice place. You've got the chimney buildings. Then you've got other places around the world. You might have the Great Pyramids, and you've got Egypt. Let's see. I don't want to spoil everything. Maybe you've got Japan, and you've got all really nice skyscrapers or maybe some cherry blossom trees. I love cherry blossom trees. We've got places that are common to us that we don't think about as being unknown to other people. You grew up going to Niagara Falls. We're probably there at least once a year, but that's one of the most amazing places that most people travel around the world to see. That's true. You could include something like Niagara Falls. Really, it's just to create a great environment for people to kind of get outside of their own little bubble that they may live in, even if they're younger kids and just realize, wow, there are other people out there that may live differently that might value this, that might want to do that instead of this. I think that's just a great thing to understand and just kind of know as a reality. What do you think players would enjoy more? More of the modern day or the ancient Rome and ancient Egypt and Machu Picchu and places like that, or do you think it's a combination? I think we can do a combination. I don't think there needs to be a timeline on this game. I think that modern day is fine, and history is its own thing, but I think that places, especially cultures, cultures may innovate over time. They may change a little bit, but those places around the world, those geographical spots, they're never going to go away. If you want to talk about current Egypt, you still can't leave out the ancient pyramids. Those may be from thousands of years ago, but they still mean just as much today as they did then. Things like that, you can't miss that. You need to be able to implement that. Honestly, I feel like I am going to continue to use Egypt. You do take those away, and it means something completely different. You don't want to focus just on the culture that you see now, but just how has that grown? How has that grown for every culture, every different type of people out there, including us? Anyways, what are some places around the globe that you might want to see in the game that might make you a little bit more excited to play? I know I already mentioned this place, but I have always wanted to go to Venice, Italy. I'm fascinated by it. I'm fascinated by a city that's surrounded by water. You know I love to swim and boat, but riding around in a gondola would be super fun. That would be cool. I would love to see a place like that there. I think if you asked your dad, he'd probably tell you Alaska. Although recently, he told us there was another place he'd love to visit. Anyway, I think Yellowstone and- Yellowstone National Park is another thing I could do. Yeah. I mentioned Thailand. When I was a teenager, I spent a month in Thailand, and a good bit of our time was in the city of Bangkok. We traveled by train to several of the farm areas, and it was really different. Very similar to when we go to New York. We don't spend time in New York City. We are in the rural areas of New York, western New York. It's really, really different once it gets out into the countryside, but I think that places like that and being able to represent- Get some of the respect and more of just a realization or recognition that they're looking for. Offering that perspective. Then the other place that I think we don't see as being super exciting, although we love going there, but the Outer Banks. That's a pretty fascinating location for people around the world, but we've traveled there so often that sometimes I think we take it for granted. Something like that, the graveyard of the Atlantic being incorporated into this game somehow, and the rich history that's there could be really incredible. Will the game include facts about those places? It would. I would like to implement a stack of cards of some type that not only are facts, like maybe facts that can help you later on in the game, but really the whole goal of the game, everyone's going to be handed a journal log, and it's going to already have all of the printed places that are on the map on there. The goal is to just check off and mark up every single one that you've been to. You want to make sure you've been to all of them. That's how you win the game. What I'd like to do is create a system where as you're moving from place to place, you're traveling. Once you get to that place, you're a tourist there. You're living there. Your piece is there. In order to leave, in order to check that place off the map, off of your journal log, you would need to answer some questions or a question about their culture, a little trivia segment to that, in order to earn that spot. You know what I mean? Instead of just going there and saying, I did it. I love that. I'm an educator, so my mind goes to a classroom, but that would be a really cool way to teach kids about other cultures. Exactly. Even geography, would there be any opportunity in the game itself to... Well, a lot of people, believe it or not, they can't really point you if you were like, hey, where on the map is France? They couldn't point you there. The way I'd like the board to be created is honestly just look like a world map, and then those spots where you were traveling to, they would be a little bit more enlarged. You could see where they were located, and I think that would just help with people realizing that. I would love to be able to... You know how Monopoly has the different pieces that you move? I would like to be able to... We're using a 3D printer in this class, which is amazing. I've been able to learn how to do that, which is something I've never been able to do, but I'd love to create pieces of different ways to travel, and that was how you'd pick. If you were in Monopoly, what piece would you normally pick? Maybe the little car. Maybe the little car, okay. Well, see, I would like to create pieces that are all different ways of traveling. I love that. We'd have a boat. Someone could be the boat. Someone could be a plane. We've got a car. If you're going to Venice, you might be in a gondola. When I went to Thailand, we traveled on a train all the time. We could have a train as a piece. It may not make sense all the time. You may be trying to go across water, and you'd be in a car, but the concept is traveling, and I think that's a great way for kids and adults alike to just be able to collaborate together, learn about different cultures, have a good time doing it, have some competition involved. Sure. I think that would be a great thing, and I think it would just honestly create a great experience. That sounds like a lot of fun. So, how would you win this game? Do you win by getting to the most places, learning the most facts? So, definitely, you would win by making sure that every place on that map you had visited and you had checked it off your journal log. The journal logs, you know, I thought about this for a while, and I was like, you know, I know this is my first time ever creating a board game, but I want it to be something that's able to be reused. I know in some games, they just give you a whole stack of pre-printed ones or like papers that you have to fill out so you can just keep going through them, and I know I don't really have access to anything like that, but what I did think I could do was instead laminate the cards, laminate the journal logs or passports. It kind of looked like a passport. Laminate them and then supply everyone with an Expo marker. That way, they can check off those places, they can do it, and then once they're done, they can. So, I think that'd be a great way to be able to reuse the game, reuse the pieces, and just be able to not just get one big use out of it, you know, just for a class, but be able to be able to take it home or share it with friends. I'm very excited to get to play this. Can't wait to see it. Absolutely. I'm very excited to be able to create it, and thank you for coming on to the first podcast. This is definitely the first one I've ever done, and I'm glad that you were my special guest here. This is just my first little trial and error at this thing, and we will see where it goes from here, but thank you guys for tuning in, and we will talk to you later. Thank you.