Developer’s Diary: 2nd Playtest Night

Welcome Back Gamers!

Our playtest board with temp art and temp meeples!

Welcome back to another marvelous blog post by yours truly, with some behind-the-scenes work by Brett! This post will (hopefully) be a quick rundown of our latest playtest from this last weekend. Stick around for a brief sneak peek at our round mechanics, and how we're working in a very unique objective. To spice things up, we'll even foreshadow a few changes we're implementing that could show up in our next blog post!

Quickly, I would like to provide a quick rundown of the dynamics of our game as well as mention the main objective. This board game is going to be focused around developing your tribe (growing from Warriors > Rangers > Elders) through resource gathering based on semi-random map generation, upgrading skills bought from a shared player deck, and fighting off the enemy tribes through dice-based combat.

The main objective of the game is to transport one of your Elders across the battlefield to your tribe’s endzone (promised lands? - we are still workshopping the name).

Let’s break all of that down!

A simple escorting of one of your team’s mvp's to the endzone, how hard could it be?

Since we have started this project, we have had roughly 4 in-person group gatherings to better formulate the game. We've only ran two solid playtests so far, but we were able to get much closer to the end of the last one. Ideally, we would like the game to take 60-90 minutes. But at this stage of development, we are taking extra time to dissect every unique scenario that we encounter and this last playtest took over 4 hours... We only made it through about ~10% of the game during our first playtest last October. This time we got about ~30% of the way through. Although it’s a little difficult to gauge considering our current stage of development + the fluidity of the game’s objective.

Now why the heck should I care about those darn resources?

In short, resources are very important. That’s why.

In order to fully understand them, we will need to explain how a round works. A player’s turn is broken down into 3 phases: Economy, Action, and Combat. During the Economy phase, you will be depositing gathered resources into your bank to then purchase new units, bid on new skills, and promote your units. During the Action phase, you will be moving your units into strategic positions to gather resources or take resources away from your opponents. During the Combat phase, you will be fighting to defend your resources or charging into battle to take your opponent's resources.

So to sum up, resources are very important.

So where do these custom skills come into play?

We've built a good structure to our game, and wanted to add some flavor to enhance gameplay and keep things interesting. So, we workshopped skills that could be purchased over the course of the game that interacted with its base structure and also grant more relevance and value to resources..

Reasons we decided Skills were here to stay:

• We wanted players to learn the basics of the game before the complexity ramps up, enabling them to gather core mechanics and then to build on their knowledge with skills

• We wanted to place more importance on the resource gathering gameplay    mechanic - before this change, the rewards for gathering resources were not immediately satisfying

• We wanted players to make meaningful choices in the game that complemented their individual playstyles

From our playtest, we found the skill system to be a lot of fun and impactful. We identified the relative power-level that we want the skills to have and we will keep working to ensure these skills are balanced appropriately. There will be more on skills in future blog posts, so please follow our blog for future skill updates!

What’s the deal with combat?

We wanted to make dice rolling a big part of the combat system in this game. We also wanted to tie in the different tribes and their reliance on their preferred lands. For this playtest we made a chart to establish which color/symbol would beat what (1/2=Green, 3/4=Blue, 5/6=Red … it is essentially rock/paper/scissors).

Our theory was that this gives players a chance for a single warrior to win even if they are outnumbered. If the players rolled the same symbol, we would say that the swords of their tribesmen clashed together, or “Dinked!” then the players would roll again until one player came out on top.

This playstyle of combat initially seemed fun and pretty fresh. However, our team found some issues that needed to be addressed:

• Combat felt too random - There was more than enough luck involved, which made it feel unrewarding to participate in combat. It was fun when you got    lucky and 1 of your troops took out three of your opponents, but being on    the receiving end of that felt too devastating…

• 

  The aftermath of a devastatingly unlucky combat

  Combat felt like it took too much time -    Don’t get me wrong, we all loved the idea of having Dinks in combat, but there were several occasions during the playtest where we spent over a minute rolling dice, just trying not to get the same number.

• We have thought of some ways to use current game mechanics to fix this issue, but we are currently undecided on how exactly we want to move forward.

• Combat felt shallow. With this system, we don't have a way to influence the outcome of combat due to over-reliance on luck. It was unsatisfying to be in a strategic position to win, and then lose because the odds were the same. The purchasable skills we've created didn't help enough.

These problems are somewhat of our main focus currently. Combat is a huge part of the game, so it needs to feel fulfilling and make players want to engage in it. This will be the focus of our discussion during our next meeting on 11/18. We want to figure out how we can better enhance this experience, so we may speak more about our solutions in the next post!

Welp. That is all we have for you today. Until our next post, keep on gaming!

-Gavin & Brett