Play testing upon a throne of bone was always going to be hard - the logistics of getting 20 people together for a play test or at the very least replicating 20 people is going to be an epic challenge. On Friday I was surprised how hard it was to get 4 people together to test the conflict resolution system due to a series of random problems and interruptions but we managed it in the end.
The first thing we did was talk through the overall intent and structure of the game to give everybody some context because without it some of the design decision would just be odd. That went down well - and I've recruited at least a couple more players for when it actually happens. Which is nice.
For the conflict resolution system test each player was both overlord and minions. Running around - dropping piles of stuff of at the locations scattered around my living room. We had three kingdoms - each with four locations; the heart of the kingdom and 3 others places. We played about 4/5 turns with a reasonable pace despite no central timing.
We were also missing Heros. So targets were a pretty fixed thing - and one source of interference in the plans of others had been removed.
Raiding as a separate activity had been rolled into the single main mechanic via 'single stat' challenges is only a single stat counts toward victory in this location. These were pretty limited in number but seemed to be ok.
It worked pretty well - specifically for a first play test it went really well. Which is not to say we don't have a lot of feedback.
One big bit of feedback is that there needs to be more locations - that are weaker - with much larger rewards. So next conflict play test will need to be at least 6 locations a kingdom - many of them very weak to give players suitable targets in the first few turns.
A behaviour we saw a lot off and would be terrible for the main game was clumping. Dropping everything - including all three minions in one place. It's possible that the first set of changes would do something about this - as would the minions being separate people. But the overlords need a damn good mechanistic reason not to simply create one mega stack to hand to a single player.
Based in this play test - guile and magic and swords are seasoning on the combat broth. Strength wins fights and so is what really matters. Locations are defended by hordes of 1 stat mobs - so a big pile of guile (or magic) does very little vs a location as it only sends home one person. Equally swords only make things easier for the next person - who might well not be you. Even in pvp winning guile and magic were nice to do but as people did not have a large monsters the impact was limited. That was changing even in the 4 rounds we had - I had some nasty wraiths and launched a spoiler attack which not only sent some stuff home but through the use of a spell killed a couple of monsters as well scuppering that players efforts. Thatt was done against a players giant stack - left enough strength to do something else useful. But overall - it's not working quite as intended.
Or maybe it is - maybe a point of guile is just worth a lot less when costing the monsters? The test game was missing Heroes and they are one of the intended targets of guile and magic which might well reduce it's effective value as well.
Winning guile by a single point of guile was pretty pointless - unless the opponent was magic heavy.
I saw (and did) both commit stuff to claim a location and also wait to snipe (both to claim things without interferance and to spoil).
Spell cards are fun - and need to flow in. Even the weakest effect should be powered by mana so playing it reduces your later options. With one overlord being all the minions- a spell card a turn was ok - but would that would have been to little for the proper game.
Defending a location (as a location) with guile or magic generally did not work. The attacker would take a hit mainly a 1 strength ork but plough through.
Having a handful of Orc cards each of which are 1 strength was a pain and less clear then it could have been.
It was slightly fiddly but having locations impact on the kingdom heart worked well thematically. What did not was one player going for (and wining) a victory against a kingdom heart on the first turn. So hearts need to start off even stronger and get pulled apart from fights around them. Starting Heros on the heart would mitigate that. As would the the points from a heart being destruction not victory based - and victories elsewhere reducing the hit points of the heart.
That also introduced timing issue - what to resolve first?
That's what happened. Now what to do about it.....
So more, weaker, richer locations is a clear improvement. I'm thinking the start should be about 18 locations across 3 kingdoms. A kingdom does not have to the same number of locations - so one kingdom can be big and thus stronger while another can be much smaller and so easier to destroy.
I'm a little worried about the impact of the 'richer' on the economy. I think a good plan is 'loot cards' with victories taking there choice of the cards assigned to a location. This allows loot to be a really wide range of things putting some variety into victory and giving the minion a choice 'what does the boss actually want. He said 'bring me a hobbit skull - but it's that's for 4 gold and an elf skull.....' Also being the 'first attacker' has more value since you get first pick. This was an idea I'd been considering but I just ran out of time to put it into effect for the playtest.
One rather dramatic idea was 'the flattening the monsters'. This would make the monsters all 1 stat one point - while making the minion something you empower. So you rock up with a horde of orc miniatures (feels thematic) and a minion that does a lot of additional stuff. A minion is either leading - or following and only a leading minions pile of funky stuff counts towards the battle. The follower does add - but not much. That gives you a real reason not to clump.... How magic and guile work here is not clear and sending a minion home seems too big a reward...... It's a really major change following from a pretty successful play test so I've been thinking about that.
A less extreme version would be to drop the 'strength' monsters and just make strength come from the weight of orcs. Leave guile, magic, and swords as things to come from monsters - but again that requires a rewrite of how guile and magic work. One possible consideration would be to let Strength decide the winner - and let magic and guile and swords decide the consequences. So winning on strength alone would only net you one victory- while winning on guile and magic as well would net you a total of 3.
Lots to think off.
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