Nanogrid 2.0

After over a month of taking a brain break from Nanogrid development I have jumped back in. The issue I was running into was that the game was really just an interesting area control mechanic. So it wasn't FUN, just pretty. My previous couple posts were ways to make it more strategic but they all fell flat when I tested it with myself, thus me taking a break to distance myself from the game for clarity.

Nanogrid 2.0
The nitty gritty of the issues Nanogrid had was that it was for the most part multiplayer solitaire where each turn almost always had an easily deduced best outcome and no restrictions on what you could do. A few nights ago I was thinking about ways to restrict the players options on their turn when I came up with what I think is a great card play mechanism. Keep in mind the base game is virtually unchanged in this rev.

Each player always has a hand of 4 cards, and there is always a community pool of three cards on the board. There are 4 different card types, one for each of the actions possible (energize, transfer, replicate, place tile). A player can only do an action that they have in their hand at the beginning of their turn, and when they play that card it goes into the communal pool where they then take a different card out and put that into their hand for later. In this way you have the strategic implications of doing what you want to do now but not wanting to feed your left hand opponent exactly what they need. Added onto that, you are thinking about what you will be wanting to do NEXT turn, and that will influence what cards you bring back up from the public pool. Awesome.

I added onto this the ability to play 2 cards of the same color at once into the pool. This "boosts" that action, which lets you execute that action as if you had the next upgrade level already (ex .Your table says you energize for 3 pips, but you do a boosted energize so you actually add 4 pips to your dice). I also had a special combo of one transfer card and one replicate card, in order to do a replication one farther away then you are currently allowed.

I also changed the end game condition. Getting all your dice out just turned the game into a race, and that never felt right to me. Now the end game condition is tied directly in with the skill table. You win immediately if you either get your 6th upgrade of one color, or have all three color skills up to the 4th skill level at least.

The last significant change was eliminating the "hostile replication" and I attached the combat aspect of the game to the Transfer action. Now you transfer energy into an opponent, and they loose pips according to a simple difference between each of your Transfer skill levels. So if I have a transfer skill of 3 and my opponent has a skill of 4, then its a 1:1+1 situation and so my one pip of power kills 2 pips of theirs. This is meant to be a "beat up on the leader" mechanic, so the player with the lesser transfer skill actually gets the upper hand.

Playtest with people
Below is the end of the first game played with others.

Yellow : Mac
Red : Brad
Blue : Paula
Green : Me



Paula won by grabbing 6 of the green Transfer skill, it was getting close. I was one orange Energize upgrade from winning in the previous round but this was too much of a threat and Mac destroyed three of my dice with one transfer action, ouch!

One thing I really liked is that in order for Paula to win, she NEEDED to have 2 replicate cards so that she could "boost" the replication and lay down two dice. Since we can't see her hand, we didn't have one of those annoying end game situations where you can say for sure "Paula will win this turn guys". You can just say "she MIGHT be able to, depending on how she has built her hand". Plus no one noticed anyway, she was sneaky :P

Conclusions
Everyone enjoyed it, but I feel that the game went a little longer then it should have. It lasted abit over 2 hours. Here is a list of the input I got:

1. Energize is too slow and uninteresting, do something to increase the energy flow into your system
2. Having an end condition based on the number of energize locations you control would be cool
3. Transfer rate is perhaps too easy to get to ridiculously high numbers
4. Mac commented on the card mechanic being "rondel-like", and I see where he is coming from and don't have a problem with this.

So i'll be adding a new end game condition and probably changing energize to add that number of pips to more then one energize so you essentially get a 2x multiplier on your energize when you expand into more energize locations. Perhaps overkill? Only testing will find out.

I think i'm going to modify the Transfer skill tree as well, make it have a little slower of an escalation into huge transfer numbers.

All in all a great success, you all will hopefully be seeing me carrying this around and trying to get you to test it more often :)