Monday, November 12, 2018
Done.
Basically.
We had a 3p test at Spielbany that was interesting. With two new players and myself playing, the game took about 90 minutes. The idea to front-load the decision about where you're going to go between turns so you can execute quickly when your turn comes up didn't really work; the new players still took some time and the decisions took a while. Even so, the game took 90 minutes, and I think, were we to run it back, 75 minutes would have been easily achieved. That's about right.
I won the game handily, which almost never happens in any game I design, ever. It makes me think the game has a learning curve and that I've started to climb up it. I don't think this is bad but it does show that players don't have a great sense for how much hubris to take, how many green cubes to need, etc. There is a player aid that gives the math but the rules and the components need to do a better job providing this info and helping them to progress more quickly from figuring out what to do to preparing well for the temple. We all had decent info and preparation, but the newer players didn't bid aggressively enough in some cases, but bidding/auction games always take some experience and maybe it's similar here.
Unfortunately, neither of the other two players liked the game very much. They felt there was too much going on, but this may have been a matter of taste, and they said as much. I think changes to simplify the game further are worth contemplating, but I don't think the game is that much more complicated than v7 was, and we never felt that was too complicated. I think it would require a big redesign to simplify this to be a sub 60 minute game, and at this late stage I'm not inclined to embark on yet another major change like this. I'm more inclined to see whether, in its present form, it can find an audience (and a publisher). I just ran a 2p solo test today, and found once again that players in my solo tests are coming within a space of each other on the temple track, and are coming down to the final roll to see who wins. I think the game is therefore fairly tight.
That said, it does still need a cycle of development. I'm not sure the experience is uniform across player counts, or that there are enough cards. I'm not sure whether it's too hard to survive the temple and whether this needs to be loosened up a bit. I'm not sure the game couldn't still have a few rough edges sanded off. But to me, those are development level changes. From a design perspective, I am calling it done. After 13 years, and almost 10 years since v7, that is a good feeling.
Monday, November 5, 2018
New ideas, new decision points
A recent 3p playtest ran about 2.5 hours. The good news is that the temple was about 20 minutes of that, worked well, and, came down to the final roll. This is important. If the game is going to have a die-rolling final hubris challenge as a day-of-reckoning determination of who really wins, it had better deliver the right payoff, with the outcome uncertain until, ideally, the very last possible roll of the dice. And for each individual player, it should be a closely run thing, such that in the hubris challenge they either purge their hubris, or die of a curse, within one roll of the other happening. People who hate luck as a resolution system will hate this incarnation of the game, but if it continues to work this well the game will really deliver for the people inclined to like that sort of thing. And, so far so good.
But there's that 2 hours of map phase length that present a concern. I think the culprit is the four-phase turn, but we need all four of those things to happen (move, encounter, look at temple info, take adventure cards from a display). But each phase prompts you for a few decisions and actions, and that seems to be slowing things down too much.
Luckily we can find some savings by cutting out some rules. I like the "enemy gets stronger in the region you visit" effect and the "some randomizer determines what type of encounter you face when you decide where you're going" effects that we've had for a long time, but the fact is that the rules that police these do add some length as you comply with them. Moreover, once you find the encounter details, then you have to prepare for the encounter by paying some cards, which is a decision that takes 30 seconds or so.
We could reduce this if your cards instead lived in a permanent display. My latest thought is that you can have six cards on the table, with new cards added, once per turn, to the right end (removing a card from the display if necessary or desired).
At the start of each round, a die roll determines which challenge category will apply for each city type for this round. When you face an encounter, the leftmost three adventure cards in your row add 2 to your investment for each that matches the challenge category, and the next three cards, one each. You can further invest by taking hubris, but the reaction to which category you face, and the associated decision about which cards to 'play' have mostly been made between turns. This helps speed things up. I like it so far.
But there's a neat consideration that it reveals, that I don't think the game has previously had. Adventure cards all have two symbols, some combination of challenge symbols (luck, fights, escape, wits, needed for the encounters outside the temple), peril symbols (heat, fear, obstruction, climb, react, and puzzle), and effect symbols (bomb, secret door). The goal in the map phase is to know what perils await you so you can have cards in your display with those perils.
Mirroring the map phase, peril symbols in your three leftmost cards of your display count double. But, you only add one card per turn in the map phase, and always to the right end. This presents a timing issue. You have to make the decision of when to start introducing those peril cards so as to give them time to 'float' to the left of the row so they can count double in the temple, but this may mean discarding, or at the least not introducing, cards with challenge symbols, and/or discarding cards with peril symbols that you're not yet sure about. It also means putting information out publicly about what you think the temple contains; people can cue off of that. Sure, you can bluff but the game is pretty short for that kind of thing. You can hold cards back, but the hand limit will be brutally small (1-2 cards max), really limiting your ability to be covert, and again you don't have time to wait forever to put cards into play, even if you don't want others to know what you know.
Thus there's this whole new problem of symbol management and getting ready to go into the temple vs. continuing to get information. This transition between phases has been present in the game obliquely all the way back to v7, but with this new system it's achieved in a nice way. I like that, even in a game that's in a late stage, we're still discovering new ideas that emerge from the systems. Originally the game was about giving players the tools to parse an information puzzle. It was simple and straightforward. Now I think it's emerging as still pretty simple, possibly even simpler than it was, yet also offering some subtle considerations and genuinely new ideas in the form of this card display and in the penalty draft-bid in the temple. We'll see if these come through for the players.
The previous post also mentioned the order problem in the temple. In the live test the other day, we played that last-in-line chooses penalty cards first, and actually this works very nicely. The player who's trailing gets first choice of what penalty to incur, the person who is leading gets to see what everyone else has bid before committing a bid. With the added change that all of your adventure cards are on the table in front of you, this means that if the leading player has seen the peril card, then they have essentially perfect information on which to base their bid decision. (I'm toying with the idea of whether players should be allowed to drop a card into the row from their hands; I'm not sure there's a non-fiddly way to implement this though). Thus, each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, an inverse correlation between the amount of choice and knowledge that the player has. I think this is balanced nicely.
But! What I'm finding is that in many cases, you simply cannot choose to invest on any of the remaining penalty cards, however much you might wish to, because you already have too much hubris, or too few green cubes, or whatever. Yes, yes, you could have prepared better for the temple, but still, this nice bidding system is only nice if you can actually take advantage of it. The best solution I've come up with is to add some extra spaces onto the temple track where you can go off the main track to get a green cube (helps purge hubris) or purge a curse or whatever. These come at the expense of forward movement in the temple, which you need to make to be able to win, but they help you to not die, which you also need to do to be able to win, and it may be that by having more ways to avoid death, players will be freed to be a bit more aggressive in the bidding. Of course just making it harder to die is also an option, but currently it seems to be that about 1/3 of players die each game, which feels about right. Any less and the game would feel too easy; any more and it will feel like just surviving is more important than making forward progress.
But there's that 2 hours of map phase length that present a concern. I think the culprit is the four-phase turn, but we need all four of those things to happen (move, encounter, look at temple info, take adventure cards from a display). But each phase prompts you for a few decisions and actions, and that seems to be slowing things down too much.
Luckily we can find some savings by cutting out some rules. I like the "enemy gets stronger in the region you visit" effect and the "some randomizer determines what type of encounter you face when you decide where you're going" effects that we've had for a long time, but the fact is that the rules that police these do add some length as you comply with them. Moreover, once you find the encounter details, then you have to prepare for the encounter by paying some cards, which is a decision that takes 30 seconds or so.
We could reduce this if your cards instead lived in a permanent display. My latest thought is that you can have six cards on the table, with new cards added, once per turn, to the right end (removing a card from the display if necessary or desired).
At the start of each round, a die roll determines which challenge category will apply for each city type for this round. When you face an encounter, the leftmost three adventure cards in your row add 2 to your investment for each that matches the challenge category, and the next three cards, one each. You can further invest by taking hubris, but the reaction to which category you face, and the associated decision about which cards to 'play' have mostly been made between turns. This helps speed things up. I like it so far.
But there's a neat consideration that it reveals, that I don't think the game has previously had. Adventure cards all have two symbols, some combination of challenge symbols (luck, fights, escape, wits, needed for the encounters outside the temple), peril symbols (heat, fear, obstruction, climb, react, and puzzle), and effect symbols (bomb, secret door). The goal in the map phase is to know what perils await you so you can have cards in your display with those perils.
Mirroring the map phase, peril symbols in your three leftmost cards of your display count double. But, you only add one card per turn in the map phase, and always to the right end. This presents a timing issue. You have to make the decision of when to start introducing those peril cards so as to give them time to 'float' to the left of the row so they can count double in the temple, but this may mean discarding, or at the least not introducing, cards with challenge symbols, and/or discarding cards with peril symbols that you're not yet sure about. It also means putting information out publicly about what you think the temple contains; people can cue off of that. Sure, you can bluff but the game is pretty short for that kind of thing. You can hold cards back, but the hand limit will be brutally small (1-2 cards max), really limiting your ability to be covert, and again you don't have time to wait forever to put cards into play, even if you don't want others to know what you know.
Thus there's this whole new problem of symbol management and getting ready to go into the temple vs. continuing to get information. This transition between phases has been present in the game obliquely all the way back to v7, but with this new system it's achieved in a nice way. I like that, even in a game that's in a late stage, we're still discovering new ideas that emerge from the systems. Originally the game was about giving players the tools to parse an information puzzle. It was simple and straightforward. Now I think it's emerging as still pretty simple, possibly even simpler than it was, yet also offering some subtle considerations and genuinely new ideas in the form of this card display and in the penalty draft-bid in the temple. We'll see if these come through for the players.
The previous post also mentioned the order problem in the temple. In the live test the other day, we played that last-in-line chooses penalty cards first, and actually this works very nicely. The player who's trailing gets first choice of what penalty to incur, the person who is leading gets to see what everyone else has bid before committing a bid. With the added change that all of your adventure cards are on the table in front of you, this means that if the leading player has seen the peril card, then they have essentially perfect information on which to base their bid decision. (I'm toying with the idea of whether players should be allowed to drop a card into the row from their hands; I'm not sure there's a non-fiddly way to implement this though). Thus, each position has its own advantages and disadvantages, an inverse correlation between the amount of choice and knowledge that the player has. I think this is balanced nicely.
But! What I'm finding is that in many cases, you simply cannot choose to invest on any of the remaining penalty cards, however much you might wish to, because you already have too much hubris, or too few green cubes, or whatever. Yes, yes, you could have prepared better for the temple, but still, this nice bidding system is only nice if you can actually take advantage of it. The best solution I've come up with is to add some extra spaces onto the temple track where you can go off the main track to get a green cube (helps purge hubris) or purge a curse or whatever. These come at the expense of forward movement in the temple, which you need to make to be able to win, but they help you to not die, which you also need to do to be able to win, and it may be that by having more ways to avoid death, players will be freed to be a bit more aggressive in the bidding. Of course just making it harder to die is also an option, but currently it seems to be that about 1/3 of players die each game, which feels about right. Any less and the game would feel too easy; any more and it will feel like just surviving is more important than making forward progress.
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