Rochester Gamers Community

This time instead of writing everything out clearly I just copied and pasted my notes from the play test last night at Micre's game night.

I had fun and appreciated the guys' willingness to try my game.

This is the fourth playtest because the third was conducted by my buddy Curt with his gaming-aware family. He tried with 5 players, the old (mean) level-ups, and without the new boss tiles, but I guess it still worked pretty well. Anyway, here are my notes for last night (and Cyrus/Joel -- let me know if I forgot anything!):

Notes from fourth playtest (8/26/09)

3 players (Me, Cyrus, Joel)

Final scores: Me 13 (Goblinbane, 2 of a set, 5 others), Cyrus 7 (0 from his amulet), Joel 6 (1 from one of his amulets)

Cyrus had Apt Pupil, Joel had the "draw 2 pick 1", I had the new "draw one from the same row or column" one.

Cyrus hit his Apt Pupil (Guile) pretty hard, almost every turn after getting it

Joel used his ability every turn

I kept on forgetting about mine :(

Some suggestions:

- Shadows on the trees :)

- Draw cards at the end of the turn, after placing claim token (Cyrus): Probably will implement this one. Cyrus pointed out that what you draw will always slow the game down, but will rarely result in a different course of action. I think the speed gain is worth the hit to decision making. This would also make the Wanderer (draw 2 keep 1) ability more useful, which is good because it's underpowered right now. And drawing cards at the end of your turn is ever so Knizia-ish.

- Lots of discussion about whether Apt Pupil is overpowered. I am still not convinced it is. It is useful for 7 out of 16 spaces on the board, but useless the other 9. Maybe combined with the right amulet it is difficult to defeat, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to change the amulet scoring again anyway.

- We didn't finish the game; only played for about 55 min. Had probably 15 minutes left.

- Game play got faster toward the end. Everybody got good at figuring out their icons.

- Joel and Cyrus had a good idea for a new special ability: you can choose to draw two of one the skills you're training in instead of one of each.

- A lot of talk about abilities -- introducing a leveling tree (won't do, I don't think it'd be worth the extra balancing and rule complexity), increasing costs of some abilities (probably won't do, I'd still have to do the work of balancing the abilities and their costs, and I'll have to do that anyway because I want to end up with at least 8 evenly balanced abilities all for the same cost, preferably 1 trophy), and starting players out with an ability (interesting but probably not needed in the base game -- although staggered starting is all the rage these days)

- Should note that that's the second time some kind of starting ability/permanent icon was requested. Might be worth looking into.

- Both mentioned the icons on the cards -- yeah, they need work. The specialty cards could use some different upper left-hand corner symbolism.

- Cyrus had the idea of a village tile that bestowed bonuses when you save it -- a good idea for an expansion but will set the idea aside for now

- Cyrus suggested not allowing two-icon cards to be used for more than one challenge to keep the questing simple but I don't think I'm going to do that. The Quests would be harder to resolve; probably too hard to make the game fun. Mathematically, a quest requires an average of 13 icons, each player gets 4 icons average per turn, so we're already at over 3 turns per quest assuming they can split cards and assuming they get the icons they need. Not being able to split cards would raise the effective average number of icons by about 3 or 4 to about 16, which would require at least 4 (probably more) turns to draw up to. The game wouldn't function if you needed more than 4 turns per quest because the grid would fill up before the players had a chance to draw the right cards.

- Considering something Kevin/Curt/Brian suggested in having the tougher bad guys be worth extra points...

- Overall several encouraging comments from play testers and onlookers. Hopefully we can have it hit the table again soon.