The Distribution of Power: How the cards fall.

The play-testers made a public outing at a local place bar/gamers place called The geek easy!  This leads to the next greatest discovery.  Keep a careful eye on the Master Deck.  The original concept for siege was to have randomized booster packs and players to have custom decks, but would also be playable with a master deck that comes with the original game.  I had so many fun cards I wanted to include in the original game I just started packing them in. My experience as a novice Magic the Gathering tournament player should have taught me the important lesson some times too much is too much.  All the time issues had just about been fixed, but now the deck was just too big! Players did not gain access to the bigger Military Units fast enough and the game ended with the clock and some minor frustration.  I would have to scale the cards back, and include a “Cut list”.  The cut list would suggest the cards that needed to be removed if the game has 4 or fewer players.  While this made me sad not to include all those wonderful cards, it will allow me to pick the very best of the best for the expansion and toss out the ones that I am not as psyched about (Yes, I used psyched my 1980’s are showing). Lesson learned the Master Deck, should be simple, effective and help players learn the ropes.

More fumbles, fixes and facts about Siege of Verdan to come!!  

Pressure from the game community: To Eliminate or not to Eliminate

The industry is leaning more and more away from player elimination. I grew up with player elimination as a way of life but I see all of the valid points. I will try not to bore you with too much game terminology but there are various cookie cutter methods that help to keep players in the game. One is victory points. I feel like victory points can feel unnatural, especially in a war/strategy game. Please don’t get me wrong, some games use them very well, but many use them like a bad plot device in a book.
The problem with not eliminating a player is a situation I call “Struggling in the noose”. This is a phrase that describes a long drawn out loss. If a player is crippled and will probably not recover they get very frustrated. We found that the same level of frustration can occur when we tried to enforce our feudal system, no one wants to help the person that made them lose the game.
The next issue is the catch-up mechanic. This is a system that will allow a player that is far behind to possibly catch up and win the game. This is also hated, people that have worked hard for a lead in the game feel like it is unfair that someone can use a mechanic to spring back into life. This helps remove “struggling on the noose” but also provides a certain amount of frustration.
We designed the Kings spoils to provide a defined deadline for the game, as a side effect it allows for a lucky shot on a capital city to bring a player back from the edge of a loss. Our feudal system was our first attempt at keeping players in the game. Our Feudal system would have to go, maybe squirreled away for another game.
 Over the next week our team will be looking for an alternative rule option that will eliminate player elimination! I don’t want to use something that is not thematic, and the cookie cutter ideas rarely appeal to me. We have a few good ideas’ we will keep you informed on the progress.facebook

The world is a smaller place because of it: Movment, Time, and the deadly assassins.

First things first I re-printed all the unit cards and increased the movement rates.  Some of them I only increased the circumstantial movement rates (if the player met certain criteria that unit would increase its speed). The next thing I did was make the world smaller (a hint from James Mathe of minion games). I decreased the board size and the amount of states. This would increase the speed of the units as well and make the world more accessible, which of course spawned more issues.
I loved the concept of a player seeing a large military unit coming for his capital a long way off. It would give player time to prepare for a siege, he could retire troops that where far away and play some in his hand close to the capital to help ward off the threat and make for more climatic battles. With the new changes it would be too easy to zip over and take the capital out. The same thing would apply to a ruler, assassins would be too fast to evade. My next move would be to increase the CV of the Capital from 2 to 3.  It was only one point (16.5% more but I feel like it made a real difference). I also included a Capital City card to make it easier to keep track of. Next, I wanted to fix the value of the king.
After long debate I decided if the king falls and a player does not have a ruler to replace him, all of those players units loose the Flag Carrier ability, so the acquisition of new states is not possible. They would also have to remove one control token from play. Thematically, I felt that it fit nicely and it is not too devastating (especially if you are building your own decks). Back to play-testing, Assassin pops up on the draw...oh crap.
With the fewer amount of states that assassin was moving too fast, and hitting to hard.  This caused huge economic turmoil very quickly. I lost a whole play-test from the draw. I did three subtle things to fix this issue, one came easily the second took a while to figure out.
I slowed down the assassin, made him a little less effective in combat, and now the master deck only had two of them, next I made a much weaker version of the assassin, and really slowed him down, but more of them. I did this because it decreased the probability of only one player getting an assassin out and devastating everyone, and you could use the assassins to defend against other assassins.  Last, but not least I added a bonus to the Spy card when fighting assassins.  This gave two advantages; it added a bit more value to the spy, and added another large threat to the assassin. Thematically, who does not love an assassin killing spy? Off to do more play-testing.FacebookFacebook page