Colonial Advances

Resurrecting the "Invaded" game in the midst of all the other business going on, I have a new prototype, with its own map cards, resource cards, and so on.  You'll see from the picture below that I have replaced the map hexes with rectangular cards; I'd still hope for a final game to have hexes, but this arrangement has the same adjacency features and it is a heck of a lot easier to iterate a prototype if I don't have to keep cutting out hexagons.

Three times through the (18 card) colonial action deck with no natives.

Incidentally the circle and square in each space is an attempt to track the use of tribal units for various actions: rounds alternate between being "circle" and "square" rounds (yeah, a "square round", I know...), and during each round, used tokens get put into the appropriate shaped space to indicate their status.  The next round they move into the other shape, so we don't need to reset things between rounds.  I even have a card with a circle on one side and a square on the other to indicate which round we are on.  This seems to work OK so far, but I need more testing to see how it goes down with a variety of players.

One of the big challenges with the game so far is in building a deck of cards to control the colonial forces.  The idea is that each round, a couple of cards are drawn from the colonial deck and this results in the colonial power moving around, landing new regiments, building forts, and attacking natives when they feel like it.  I've so far had a play with the deck running unopposed to see what it does.  As you can see from the picture, it didn't result in anything particularly interesting happen, apart from the single regiment detaching and plunging into the wilds before building a fort.

Of course, this is not a natural situation for the game: there would always be at least one tribe sharing the board with the invaders, but it does indicate things aren't exactly ideal.  So, still more work to do...