Exploration and Monumentalisation

Sunday saw me having another opportunity to go to London for an afternoon of playtesting.  Unfortunately this session was a little truncated due to the pub being booked for a private function for the evening, but thanks to a slightly earlier start than usual and some careful wrangling of game designers, we still managed to get three 90 minute sessions.

This time I was up in the first slot, which was a little disappointing in that I missed out on a couple of games I really wanted to try, but that's always the problem: so many games and only so much time to play them.  This meetup was a little lighter on people than previous ones, so I ended up joining in for a three-player game of Explore and Settle -- though a fourth arrived half way through, too late to join in, but he watched and was able to contribute feedback at the end.

Slightly blurry picture, but then so was the game itself.

My latest iteration of the game had a few elements added in an attempt to fill out the game and address some of the issues raised last time.  I had added more variety in the monuments that could be built, introduced objective cards which provide victory points for various things (each player is dealt two to start), made some actions more costly in terms of gold, and changed the resource supply mechanism, and this last deserves a paragraph of its own.

Previously you were able to use resources if you could trace a path of no more than three cards back to a location that is producing that resource.  This seemed OK, but we weren't sure about keeping track of where everything was coming from, so you couldn't just use resources from the same location repeatedly.  This time round I went for a different approach.  Each time you added a card to the map, the card you added would trigger production in some locations -- you may see resource icons in circles, in the corner of the cards in the picture above; these are the triggers.  To stop things getting too messy, I figured that resources were only produced in locations that didn't already have unused resource markers there; so a maximum of one resource per card.  I also added "trade goods", effectively a wild card good that you could buy with gold from cities by the sea, and these were produced whenever a sea card was played.

Our three-player game wasn't disastrous as a game, but it wasn't a lot of fun.  As a playtest, though it was pretty good, as we found several issues that were a problem and were able to talk through several ideas that may allow me to make things better.  Thanks to Dan, Dave and (later) Mike for providing really valuable feedback here.  Some of the major points discussed were...

• We got a bit resource starved for one of the resources in the early part of the game, which made things rather frustrating for a while. There was acceptance that there are sometimes plays like this, and it's not necessarily a huge deal, but I feel that I should try to avoid creating a game where the first few turns are full of frustration.
• One possible way to ease the early game is to make the start cards special ones that always produce and never lose their production. Possibly even make the start cards coastal.  Thematically this could be a good decision for a game with an exploration element.
• The way resources were being produced, there is a real incentive to do your best to use everything up on your turn, as anything you leave is an advantage to someone else.  Later in the game most resources were fairly plentiful, so this became less of a thing, but it seems a bit of a design smell.
• Some of the choices I made about how money moves around were unintuitive, largely because it relied people to remember when they pay other players and when they pay the bank.  Need to think about this.
• There was a feeling that monuments were too hard to build, though later on, with money and resources being more available this eased, so I think this may not be a problem: when it becomes easier to build monuments, that is the end game approaching.
• The objectives look very unbalanced and a couple of them are far worse than the others.  This is something that I suspected, and will certainly pay more attention to it for future versions, as I like the idea of keeping them in.  Another thing to think about, however, is the balance of where points come from because it would be nice for there to be multiple paths to victory.
• Given that the resource production system just didn't seem right we discussed a few possible options, including going back to my previous way of doing things.  One suggestion that I very much liked was that you use your settlements to activate locations on the cards where they are sitting, so you can effectively generate one resource somewhere for each settlement you have.  This potentially means that there is an incentive to have more than one settlement on a card.  It also suggests that they aren't settlements, but clans or something.
• Finally, we had a lot of discussion about whether it is allowed to partly cover a production tab on a card.  I've always said not, but thinking about it, I could rearrange the design of the cards so that production is indicated by icons in the corners  rather than the centre of the tabs.  That way, one tab could neatly cover over one of those icons, but not the other.  This has all sorts of implications that I am thinking about.

So while my ego took a knock or two here, the outcome of this play was amazingly helpful and leaves me with a lot to work on.  Now I just need to make some changes and get a playable set again and get it in front of people soon.  I've set myself a target of having a playable set for UK Games Expo at the start of June; I won't be running an "official" playtest of it there, but hopefully there will be some opportunities in the evenings.

But I do seriously need to come up with a new name for the game.  Any suggestions would be appreciated so that I don't end up resorting to Gamey McGameface.

The couple of other games I played were a deckbuilding game set in space, with similarities to the excellent Star Realms but including the development of planets and colonies, plus some interesting other mechanisms, and a true analogue game of motor racing, where you move your car using measurements on a ruler and have to plan acceleration and braking by estimating distances on the race track. And, of course, there were some great sounding games that I missed out on too.