The Elephant in the Room.

The last play test has thrown up a serious issue with Giant Stone Head – and it's one I think I've been ignoring.  Simply put – going on the defensive and not getting into fights is the best way of winning – and in a game where the key interaction with the game and between players is fighting that make doing nothing the dominant strategy - which is sucky game play.  Good game play – I think - will revolve around having to balance attacking and defending. 

The winner of Monday's play test was almost totally passive – pretty much sat out the entire game- did not attack anybody – and scored a run away victory almost lapping me and told me he loved the game…. 

He confessed to being a 'turtle' by inclination and there were a couple of things that helped him.  He managed to stop his chief rival attacking him twice at key times through us of the "Invite Neighbours cards" (force peace between you and somebody else).  He seemed to have lots of resources despite having no space – despite the game actively penalising you in terms of resources for generating victory points – so part of me wonders if a mistake was being made.

The specific don't really matter – what matters is that at the end of the game talking to one of the other players – who's played the game about 3 times – was that it had thrown up a problem.  Really it's just forced me to confront a problem that I've been denial about – the elephant in the room so to speak.

It's not something I've totally ignored – I've had feedback from players that they did not see the reason to attack – and in response to that added epic poem cards – extra men or VP's for attacking.  None of it however is really enough.   

The core trouble is that the game is designed to stop a player becoming dominate and taking over everything – or at least to make it very unlikely to happen.  As a player expands they get more and more resources.  In a lot of games this can often result in a positive feedback loop – the act of winning makes you win more – and more and more.  Here resources simply don't scale that way – the more useful stuff you've already got this turn the more resources the next useful stuff costs.  I want to say pyramid numbers but I'm not sure that's a real term but you get the idea.  The intention is to make it very hard for one player to drive many players out of the game – because even if one players has more resources then all there opponents – they don't end up with that much more useful stuff.

But there's a flip side to this – if a player turtles there reduction in overall effective power is much less then you might otherwise expect.  Combined with the combat system being pretty vicious – the attacker and defender lose the same number of men – the person who avoids combat can gain a significant numerical advantage.

I'll talk about the possible solutions rattling around in my head another time – this already seems long enough – but if there's one lesson to take it away from this it's that you need players to play against your intentions and expectations to see how the game works.  Whereas I think my players have played the game as I intended it to be played.  I really should thank Monday's nights player – so thank you – you git.