Version 2.02

So the first thing was that playing by myself made it really clear that - yes - it broadly worked but suggested one minor change for public consumption. So I then took 2.02 went for a spin around magic nerd club (my last magic nerd club in fact).  Where it turned out to be actually playable - and quite fun.  Which was a relief after version 2.01 was a giant step backwards...  This was a 3 player game - and they have often been the oddest ones.

So what changed?

Well the major change was to introduce "villages" that are built on food - these acted as a limit on the total number of warriors you could have (so 3 warriors for every village), and also as what brought your warriors into the game (1 warrior at each village).  As expected this meant people had an incentive to use there men a lot more because if they were at there maximum number of men they'd not get any more the next turn. 

Secondly I tweaked the raid rules so the attacker only ever needed a single warrior to raid - no matter how many were in the receiving hex - and gave a reason to raid the person with the most VP's.  Introducing a churn of warriors for renown.

Thirdly I removed one entire deck of cards - the one that allows you to build stone heads and moved that to an "at any time" list.  Which in turn meant changing the resource set up heavily as now one entire set of resources was no longer needed.......

Fourthly - movement was reduced to a single hex - mainly because I was worried about villages being vulnerable to sneak attacks.

Fithly introduced a special hex "basalt stone quarry" which meant any GSH you built that turn generated more victory points.

So how did it work - and what did not work - because clearly not everything worked.....

While the villages limited the men correctly and drove people into conflict - however I think the pool might be a little to small.

Having to have renown to build stone heads - also drove conflict.

And losing the project cards to an "at any time" list worked really well.  While the reduced cost of stone heads combined with the build once and cover - meant that we soon ended up with the board covered in stone heads. 

The slower movement seemed good - it became less of a knock about game - and you needed to think a bit more.....   Downside giant stone heads tended to get built in "safe" locations - and so seldom got kicked over.  However a few more swift movement cards would have gone down a treat.....

So what did not work?

Well with a single resource the board soon got covered and we saw a resources crash far far to early- and with the slow movement people tended to just fight over what was near them - rather the seek out ones that they "needed".

RongaRonga cards - formally known as "epic poems" - cards designed to reward attacking seemed to have become very seldom played from really rather key.  If you were going to give up something - you gave up them.....  So they need - reviewing/rebalancing.  It's possible there no longer needed - since they were introduced to reward conflict and the renown seems to do a better job of that.  Actually one of the Ronga Ronga cards turned out to be utterly pointless......  So that needs to go.....

Raids need to a) have a slightly more random way of deciding who won and b) it needs to be the case that defensive locations do something to help against raids - otherwise you just get raided out of them far to easily.  But that's a balance issue - the idea seems sound. 

The key seems to be sorting out the resource generation - we need something that a) offers players a little bit of choice in what to attack (so one hex can be worth more to one player then another), b) has more spaces to build on such that "resource collapse" happens later in the game.

So the question is - am I at the "change one thing and one thing only" stage of tweaking - not just yet I think.  As somebody said last night "you've changed a lot!" and there right.  A hell of a lot of stuff changed - so I really am back at the early stages where major design shifts are still a decent idea...... 

Oh and a random conversation gave me an idea for a rather nice game mechanic for a totally different game.... So I'll file that one away in the "ideas" holder and come back to it another day.....




 



 

I Aten't Dead

It's taken over a month - but I've finally got the notes I scrawled down on a train into a play testable version - I've got to do a solo play before I will let anybody else near it but that's a job for tonight and I'm hoping to talk Magic nerd club into playing it on Monday night.  So expect a report soon.

On the one hand this feels like it's taken forever to make any progress - however it took most of Saturday and a bit of Sunday to write out the rules and do another total update of the physical components - and two episodes of castle to sort out the printing problems and cut out it all out.  That's a lot of time to set aside.

The real problem is that I've learned I need to set aside a big chunk of time otherwise I get nowhere - I don't seem to be able to focus well enough to add up the odd day here and there - and finding that much spare time in one go is not currently easy......

Lets see how this has worked......

Version 2.02

So sitting on a train I finally got to write down the ideas for giant stone head version 2.02.

And on paper this looks like it should work - I'm actually sort of excited.....

Just trying to work out when I'll get to make this version - and when I'll get to check if it's playable - before inflicting it on other people........

So that did not work

Tested version 2.01 over the weekend and it's safe to say - total failure.

Introducing low stakes combat meant people were terrified of high stakes combat.  Which mean massive armies built up making people even more scared of high stakes combat.

The new renown from raiding  rules encouraged people to pick on the weak - causing them to spirl downwards.

While at the same time renown has to tight - preventing people from building stone heads at all......

The act of sacrificing cards was both fiddly and time consuming as you tried to work out the correct ones to give away but also seemed slightly pointless because so many of the cards were so very similiar....

Actually called the game to a halt because it just was not working.  You might expect that to feel rather negative but oddly not.....

Firstly there were a couple of things that did work.  The new hearts = man in defence, bangs = man in attack work.  Less felxibile but nobody got confused by it.  People liked the "each different symbol = new card" removing diminishing returns.  But the idea of renown as a resource - gained by attacking - seems solid and would drive the game play I want.  I just need to work out how to implement it......
 
Secondly I had a bunch of other ideas I want to test - again pretty damn radical changes - so all is not lost.  And if it continues to suck - well I'll just swing back to version 1.2 and implement some of the other lessons learned in that and go forwards.....

But if there is one take home lesson from this - it's remember what they said on the board game course.  Make your first version, play it solo (take all the roles), and that will tell you if it is basically ok.  If I'd of done that I might well have noticed the problems without wasting my friends time..... an important lesson.

Forwards to a glourious future that contains stone heads!

Starting almost from Scartch

The play tests for giant stone heads have given me a lot of feedback - and i've come to the conclusion that as a game it works if "you play it right" and fails if you don't.  Which is a problem.... Now obviously any game can have it's wheels fall off if players want to make it crash - or want to pick one player to be the winner - but I'm not talking about that.  It's players doing obvious, often sensible things, and the rules falling apart as a result.

So I need to think of ways of creating a game that a) rewards players for acting in certain ways without b) making it required and/or the only choice.

We've had two problems - which have been a) turtling and/or the disinterested player and b) the ease at which you can drag another player down at both your expenese.

Both of which actually revolve around the same issue - the lack of a positive economy in attacking.  Attacking costs you men, costs them men, and well the winner gets a benefit out of it - it's a fairly small benefit because more territotry is often not that impressive.  Lose 3 men to gain 1/3 of a man a turn.  Sure it might pay of in the end but it proberbly won't.....

Now the game works best when there are small battles - raids if you like -rather then wars of Genocide.  But at the momment players don't really have the option to engage in anything other then wars of Genocide.

So I'm going to create Giant Stone Head Version 2.01 and change a lot - just to see what happens.

The first thing to do is scrap the current resource system - I was heading towards this anyway.  So now we are going to have resource spots that tie directly into the two card decks.  So some generate projects and others generate ideas.  However rather then the value of these spots decreasing in a pyarmid numbers kind of way - what we are going to do is have different ones and you get one new card per a different symbol.

In addition the cost to play project cards will either be in cards (ala San Juan) or renown.  Renown comes from attacking so more later.  The upper half - the practical part of the card - will be paid in terms of cards.  The bottom part of the card will have a cost in renown (and cards) - this bottom part will most often involve building a giant stone head.  So to get the most out of there cards - and to stand any chance of winning players will have to attack.

So onto violence - we are looking at a big change here.  Players now have the ability to declare two sorts of attacks.  Raid and Conquests.  Raids are lower stakes and gain renown.  Combat as before - but in a raid the loser loses one piece, the winner loses none and gains a renown.  The attacker then retreats.  So they may attack - and gain a benefit without dragging themselves down and a small impact on the defender.

Conquests are old school attacking - winner is the person left holding the square with combat by elimination.  However such an attack costs renown rather then gains it - so wars over space will happen but a player doing it has to really want it.  And the new resource system makes the value of a space different for different players.

I'm sure these changes won't work out quite the way I expect but I don't think I lose a lot by trying them. 




 

Gasp - another play test!

So last weekend I play tested GSH 1.2 which was intended to fix the turtling problem.  It’s taken a long time to get round to this test……  Having people willing to play the same game again and again to help you refine it is actually kind of hard to get.

The solution I was trying out was a rather large change.  Rather then stone heads producing a steady trickle of VP’s and inviting players to kick them over to stop it – they now produce a burst over a turn and could not longer be kicked over – they would become an eternal block on that resource.

The intention was to force a player to attack – because if they tried to turtle up in a single hex they would run out of space to score.  So they would have to go on the attack.  With the added bonus that the board would be covered in giant stone heads by the end of the game where as in previous games there can be none on the board at the end  – which in a game about giant stone heads seems a bit like thematic fail.

So how did it go?  Well it was only a 3 player game – and that always seems to play differently.  There’s a very large danger of two players exhausting themselves in combat –allowing the third to become dominate especially if that third player just sits back.  And that’s pretty much what happened.  I seized a rather commanding lead in points,  some body attacked me really hard (much harder then I expected) and weakened us both,  well the other player sat back and started to build.  The third player then started to pull in points – but neither of the other two of use were powerful enough to challenge him well he concentrated on holding land and gaining points…..    In the end the baby lead to calling it off before the end but we both agreed he’d win.  Worse the second player – who brought us both down – was close to being lapped in terms of victory points.

I think the rule change would stop the turtling behavior that broke the game- pull back to a single hex and refuse to get involved.  I can also see how a player could work a “moving turtle” – where they march slowly forwards hexes after hex – taking the VP’s and then moving on.  But worse it does not solve the “disinterested” player problem where one player remains aloof from the conflict and benefits from other peoples conflict.  Made worse by the simple combat by elimination which produces a “negative economy” from engagement in violence which is bad.

After the game I did work up a bunch of other improvements I wanted to try.  But the more I look at it – the more I wonder if the problem is not more fundamental.  That a rules change won’t fix it – I need a serious rethink.  Do I shift to giant stone head Version 2.1?  Not that I'm sure what I'd change at this point as these thoughts litterally came out as I wrote this entry.....

I'll sleep on it - let my subconcious work. It's smarter then I am anyway...... 

Slow Progress Is Slow

I now have a version 1.1 of Giant Stone Head I want to play test - but actually getting round to that play test is proving tricky......  The fact that everybody at Magic Nerd Club is not battering down my door may well tell me something important in and off it self.

In fact things have got slowed up I've started working on another board game - Holy Writ.  This one has not even got to version 0.01 yet but I'm hopeful.

But since somebody visited me yesterday I should do the honest thing and post more content.

A while back I promised to post why I really really hate a game called innsmouth escape and now seems as good a time as any other.  Please bear in mind I played this game about 3 years ago - so if I'm sketchy on details that's why.

So briefly - Innsmouth Escape is a cthulhu themed board game - in which one of you plays a poor bewildered soul chased by the villainous deep one's around the most well known coastal village in Geekdoom.  Hounded you attempt to free your companions before you are brought down and doom overtakes you all.

That sounds good - and indeed might be.  It's not the game we've got.  I remember clearly - checking the rule book with total disbelief when the person explaining the game told me a rule.  When the human is finally brought into conflict with the deep ones they all get to roll a D6 and might inflict a wound.  The human being as 12 wounds.  After that conflict the human automatically kills every single deep one that's found him.  Wipe them out.  All of them. 

As the human player moves around the board at lightning speed - he can uncover items - items of dark and sinister power that he can use.  The deep ones on the other hand plod slowly forwards.  Before the end we started assuming we were the carebears - trying to hug the man and bring him back to his sense while he raged and slaughtered us...... because

Thematically it would have worked if the human player had been an evil mage and those hot on his heels - the forces of law and order.  Non-magical and utterly out of there depth.  Trying to desperately track him down and finish him off before his evil plot could be completed.....

But lets talk about some of it's rules failings.  Well firstly it claims to be for 2 to 4 players - but it's clear it's never been play tested for anything other then 4 players.  Because it was just about balanced (if poor) for 4 players but a 2 player game simply cut the forces of the deep one by 2/3.  Making the game impossible for the deep ones to win.....

So we've got all of that - and then - and then it messes up it's core game play.  It's a hidden movement game.  What's the core game play of hidden movement like scotland yard - a mental battle between the hiden and the chasers as they try and think "what has he done.....?"  So when the pursers move like snails - and the human can literally move from one side of the board to another - that sucks. When it's a bloody grid board - so you don't have choke points or different ways of moving - that's even bloody worse!

As a deep one you had to scatter your people and hope he appeared in the same space as them.  Once - ONCE - something happened - we got to see one of his cards and were able to work out he was going to be in one of three places - so moved to respond to that.  And throw 12 deep ones at him.  That he slaughtered - hid -healed up and went on like nothing had happened.    That's the core bloody game play and they messed it up.

If I can't do better then that - I deserve bloody shooting.