Well, sort of. I knew I loved the card play mechanic that was introduced in the last post but I also went abit crazy trying to figure out how to balance it so it wasn't so easily breakable. Mak, in our test game, proved he could just horde replicates and dominate with a win as soon as he was within boosted replication reach of his end goal. In addition to this, I had "boring turn" syndrome where energizing was simply not "cool" and it took your entire turn. I always did like it when you got to do two things on your turn.
which led me to the following revalation: By placing a card onto the public tableau, and then bringing a different card back into my hand I am in essence choosing TWO different actions. What if you perform the action of the card you play as well as the card you pick up all in the same turn? And in the order you choose? Holy crap that sounds interesting! I honestly had this idea very shortly after the last play test, but I didn't get around to trying it until about a week ago.
Why'd it take so long to try this?
My frustration with other parts of the game honestly kept me away for a while. It wasn't until a week ago that I had the second big idea that I got myself in gear and built it out into a new prototype: What if your cubes on the board can move? Not only that, what if they don't actually hold a value at all... they are simply movable playing pieces? Now I don't have to get my brain hurting with transfer distances, and swimming my eyes over a sea of pips on top of crazy connecting lines. PLUS it gives me a great excuse to use all those blank dice I purchased over a year ago!
After one quick playtest with movable cubes and the new two for one action mechanism I knew I was ready to try it with my friends. Below is a picture of the end of the first game with others. It might not be obvious on first glance, but yellow won the game by getting to the 6th green upgrade (he forgot to push up the skill since it was inevitable so everyone forfeited their turns).
This game was played with Geoff, Evan, and Erick and it was really interesting. Firstly, they all said they not only enjoyed it but want to be a part of future tests. As a designer there really isn't a better compliment then that. There were definitely problems still however, most notably bieng the ability for one or two people to totally lock down the movement of pieces...which can completely nullify other peoples turns since they can't actually DO anything.
So a significant amount of brainstorming with everyone went into how to force people to actually play the cards in their hands instead of hoarding all the replicates while everyone else stagnates. My solution for this so far has been to make the Primary (playing card down) action and the secondary (picking card up) actions more and more different. In some cases like replication I am trying to make it actually slightly painful to pick up so that you can't just easily grab them to screw everyone else. I want you to still be able to block in this way, but it has to hurt a bit. I added a "spend energy to move a cube" action to the energize role as well in order to get more moving going on the board.
A second playtest happened two nights later and it was also very successful. This time one big issue was that I reduced energy input far too much and we all hit a drought of energy which we couldn't get out of. We house ruled it halfway through the game to keep going, but this lead to a great train of conversation on how small changes in one portion of this game can trickle through several other mechanics.
I am happy to say that at this point I feel I am finally out of the "innovate" phase of this game and now into the "balancing" phase. I feel the card play mechanic is interesting and enjoyable, and now am going to be striving to get all these moving pieces to work smoother together. I expect numerous small revisions in the next couple months as I tweek it, but its definitely going places.
