FORE!

So last night I play tested the new version of Giant Stone Head – number 4.0 due to the large amount of changes.  And it was good.  No really - it ended and I was quite pleased.

The two main changes certainly fixed what they were meant to fix.  Using just resources for build and turn order made the book keeping much quicker and easier (the whole game was about 2 hours for 5 players which makes the holy grail of 90 minutes look much more achievable) – while hidden victory points made the end game less anaemic as you did not have the sense of ‘the end result is obvious’. 

A lesson in ‘don’t change to much at once’ however the addition of shaman cards has complicated the game and I’m not sure it’s actually needed.  Perhaps just slightly wider diversity in the build would have been enough to make first spot a good enough option to be worth taking…..  That one really needs a game breaker to test it out....

I described it as “the first time in a long time I’d not had any nagging doubts”.  The core game mechanics now seem more solid even if I’m not sure about the Shaman cards.   And the book I’m reading at the moment repeats the following quote a lot “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” (apparently that is from  Antoine de Saint-Exuper ) and the Shaman cards certainly look like something bolted on to be smoothed away.  So lets keep that in mind.

Once people had gone home – I started thinking about how the game was at it’s best when your spotting and exploiting opportunities and how the current cards (specifically the RongaRonga and Pimp Your Moai cards) don’t support that very well.  RongaRonga simply don’t drive your planning  because they are not a big enough while playing a pimp my Moai is actually an excuse to defend and do nothing. Equally the quarry – which is meant to be a place of exciting violence and high drama- has been grabbed by one player who has held onto it all game and not done very well out of it…..

Things I like – and are working – stone heads give you two VP’s when you build them –and one vp when you kick over other peoples.  I like that – it drives conflict – makes building stone heads the key sourve of VP’s (which it has to be in a game about building stone heads) and makes you a target by the very act of gaining VP’s.  It’s neat.

I’m less sure about how players gain additional VP’s from their own giant Stone heads (The pimp my Moai card or possession of the quarry which replicate each other effects).  So what I want to do – change the value of the quarry and the card – so the quarry is better in some way then the card not the same.  So possession of the quarry carries a greater premium and is not simply invalidated by randomly drawing a card (or likewise just drawing that card is not the stroke of great fortune). 

I also want to ensure people are active and doing rather than sitting defensively.  It would also be good to have a stronger reason to attack hexes that don’t hold a giant stone head.

So let’s keep the quarry as it is – at the end of the turn you can turn all of your giant stone heads to unwhorshiped for one VP each.

Lets change the ‘pimp my moai’ card so that if you win a victory against anybody you can flip one of your giant stone heads for 1 VP.  It’s still only 1 VP – but it also removes a reason to attack you which is good….

The later in the turn a player goes – the better the quarry is (less chance to lose it and more knowledge of the number of stone heads you'll have at the end) where as the earlier in the turn the better the pimp my moai card is (because it removes more peoples incentive to attack you).  Which is balanced – and you might well need more than one of these a turn so having a number in the deck is less of a problem. 

This rather fills the slot currently taken by RongaRonga cards (win fight – get 1VP) even if by a different mechanism – so I think this will replace the attack a person in a particular seat around the table.  So what happen to the “steal a VP” card? Well I think nothing.  We keep it as is – a Ronga Ronga card that’s used for hitting people further up the resource track then you – although I want to call it ‘Rob from the Rich!’. 

That feels a solid set of changes – and I’m unsure enough about how that will affect play that I’m going to withdraw the Shaman cards for the next play test.  They exist to make a tactic I don’t even know would work from looking appealing – avoiding resources and hanging around at the back – and last night people mainly used being at the back in order to grab being at the front next turn.  With even less stone heads on the board as people flip them mid turn being at the back to hovering up VP’s looks less likely.

All rather hopeful - i really should see if I can get a version ready to drag to bristol.