What happens when ten young people spend a week exploring games, challenges, creativity and the board game industry?
They come home and create a game of their own.
Erasmus Unleashed is an Erasmus board game created by the ten Game On members who took part in PlayQuest in Prague.
It became a tangible outcome of everything they experienced and learned during the week.
From Players to Game Designers
PlayQuest gave the team much more than opportunities to play new games.
At The Grail, they explored different game mechanics and saw how board games encourage communication, strategy and social interaction. They also discovered how a passion for games can develop into a business.
At Prison Island, teamwork, quick thinking and challenges took centre stage. The experience showed how simple rules, time pressure and different types of tasks can keep players engaged.
MindMaze demonstrated another side of game design. The team experienced how storytelling, history, physical objects and real locations can become part of a game.
Finally, their visit to Albi brought everything closer to professional game development. They learned how ideas evolve through brainstorming, prototyping, testing and improvement.
Then came the real challenge:
Could they use what they had learned to create their own board game?
Creating Erasmus Unleashed
The ten participants worked together to develop the idea from scratch.
They created the concept and story, developed the rules and decided how players would move through the game. They designed the cards, questions, challenges, item tokens and pet meeples.
They also had to think like game designers.
Would the rules make sense? Would players stay engaged? Would the game be challenging without becoming frustrating? Most importantly, would it be fun?
Through discussion, teamwork and plenty of decisions, Erasmus Unleashed started taking shape.
A Pet’s Quest Across Europe
The game begins with a mystery.
Your owner has gone away on Erasmus, but you don’t know where they are.
Playing as their pet, you travel across Europe searching for belongings your owner left behind.
Players move between countries and answer questions about culture, geography, history and Erasmus. They can also face timed challenges along the way.
Answer correctly and you collect one of your owner’s items. Get it wrong and that item moves somewhere else in Europe.
The first pet to collect all five items reunites with its owner and wins.
The concept turns the team’s own Erasmus experience into a playful journey through Europe.
Turning Learning Into Something Real
Erasmus Unleashed represents more than the finished board game.
During PlayQuest, the participants played, experimented, solved problems and explored the gaming industry. They saw how games can encourage learning, communication, creativity and teamwork.
Then they applied those lessons themselves.
They went from playing games, to understanding how games work, to creating one of their own.
And that is exactly what Game On set out to achieve: giving young people opportunities to learn through games while developing creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving and initiative. These skills and the creation of youth-designed game prototypes form part of the project’s objectives and expected outcomes.
Erasmus Unleashed is their idea, their teamwork and their PlayQuest experience turned into a game.
