Xenoterra Playtest 1

Last night Jes and I did the first playtest of Xenoterra and it was... interesting. Below are a couple photos of the current state of the game, and then i'll follow with my thoughts and ideas on how things will change.  The rules played were essentially identical to the ideas in the last post, so if you read that then hopefully the card layout makes a bit of sense.

Here is one of the 7 sheets of cards made for this game:

Firstly, these cards were created using my friend Teale's card prototyping software "Nothing Sacred Cards".  His main boardgame design website is NothingSacredGames.com and you can go straight to the download by clicking here. Super powerful program once you wrap your head around it, and Jes came up with the idea to create a Google Doc that will actually generate the code required for the cards straight out of the spreadsheet.  To give you some idea, the actual data that was used to create these cards looked something like this:

This means that balancing and adding new cards is as easy as modifying cells in a spreadsheet or adding new rows.

For this playtest I had created 26 unique cards, and with multiple copies of all of them created a 56 card deck to play through. The player sheets looked like this:

The population cubes went on the left grid, "temporary use" actions like drawing cards and when construction/research completed went into the temporary area and I used 3 D8s in the bottom to show how much of each resource a player had.  The way the temporary actions worked is if a single population was used then it went into the "1 cost" slot.  If three population were used (either for drawing a card, or when a building with 3 stages completed) then one cube was put into each of the boxes for "1 cost", "2 cost", and "3 cost".  Once a turn all the cubes shift once to the left, back towards the grid.  This idea was to show longer term effects of large action use, if you spend 4 actions to do something then it'll take 4 turns to get all of those cubes back.

Here is a photo I took midway through the game:

As you can see, I used my iPad to draw up a quick "capacity" track, turn order circle, and card row action use modifiers.  iPads are useful! Jes trounced me, winning 10 to 6, and it took about half an hour to play.

Playtest Thoughts:

1.  Holy crap is the "Capacity track" fiddly! As a recap, almost every card that can be built has a "-capacity" value and the negative values to the left of the grid of cubes are also negatives to capacity.  Several times during the game we both found that our Capacity track location was wrong because we'd missed a moment to adjust it.  We were having to adjust it about 4 times a turn on average, just terrible! Here is our thinking on it post game:

• We both really liked the moving cubes from the grid and putting them out onto other things.  Having the Population cubes be a somewhat universal resource used to show the time and investment that goes into construction/research was very cool.
• We both really liked the 4 phases to the temporary action track where cubes go after purchasing cards as well as after completing construction/research.  Having the cubes trickle back in was very interesting, and Jes built her engine around getting her cubes to come back faster.  I wish I could say this was why she won, but ultimately I don't think that really affected much.
• Lets just get rid of the "capacity track" all together! It's annoying to keep changing, and just going off of the Population grid is super elegant.  I'm thinking of maybe printing the capacity value directly into each cell of the population grid so with a glance you can tell what your current level is at.
• But what about the capacity use of the constructed buildings? I'm thinking that constructed buildings will permanently keep some number of cubes to show that they are being operated.  This will do just as good of a job at showing capacity use, and it will still be easy to see where you are at compared to everyone else.

2.  Resource gathering needs to be more effective.  Halfway through the game we changed the rule to "just take all the resources that you have unlocked" away from "take all of one resource on the card".  It's far more satisfying to take several types of resources and it makes the decision of which resource card to take way more interesting.

3. "Playing a card" as an action was just boring and felt like a waste of a turn. Very early in the game we changed it so that the moment a card is bought from the row, it comes into play on it's side to show that it isn't built yet.  

4. Going along with #3, this vastly changed how the "Action" cards worked.  Since we eliminated the idea of a "hand" very early on, the actions immediately came into effect when used.  I didn't hate this idea, in fact it got me thinking about a total overhaul of the "action" cards in general.  

• They need to have resources on the bottom of them, that was an idea to make the card row go fast and it simply went TOO fast since they all got discarded after pretty much every turn and there was little future planning.
• "Action" cards were only called that because i've played Through the Ages a ton of times.  The way they worked felt far more like an event, so i'm going to change them to "Event" cards and also tweak how they play to more accurately feel like events.  
• One thought I have for this is perhaps every event gets "Triggered" when it hits the end of the card row if no one drafted it.  This trigger can be positive or negative, but it's always global and hits all players.  This could cause an incentive to draft an event before it helps your opponent, or NOT draft an event because it'll hurt you both but may hurt opponents more.  I have always liked "events" in games, but always hated it when they are unplannable.  Nations did a good job with this in giving you a full turn to plan for the event, and this idea would give players a similar amount of time and options to deal with it.

5.  Buildings and Technology are too similar.  Some thoughts Jes and I had on changing this are:

• Perhaps buildings require more resources but less time, and technology requires zero or very few resources but far more time.  This was prevalent in the current test of the game, but not different enough.  On average buildings had about 4 levels and technology had 6.  I am thinking the averages should probably be more like 2 and 4.  
• Technology levels will perhaps use two population cubes a level to show the manpower of research, but no resources.  This means that researching will take a heavy capacity toll, but allow your resource engine to keep rolling to build buildings. It's a thought i'll give a try to.

6.  There were no interesting late game options.  It was obvious the game was a couple turns from ending and every building and technology took at least 4 steps to complete.  I'm going to work on reducing the steps as I mentioned in #5, but I feel like there needs to be other Victory point options late game.  No solid other ideas on this currently.

In Conclusion

The game was surprisingly and thankfully very "light" at this moment.  I am NOT trying to create the next brain burning 3 hour beast here, so the fact that AP was minimal and turns went quick in the first game is a victory in my opinion.  The playtest went very well overall in that I found myself hating how the game was actually being played, but loving several of the smaller mechanics and wishing they were more prominently working together.  Not bad at all for a first playthrough!  I'll be trying to impliment many of these changes over the next week to keep the ball rolling on this potentially very interesting game.  

Working title: Xenoterra

New game idea, the main mechanic has been stewing around my head for about a month now. Finally brain designed it far enough that I need to write this down and hopefully start really working on a prototype.

Overview:

1. Euro style civ / engine building game. 
2. Set on foreign planet in the future, humans land from different ships escaping from a dying earth. 
3. Lots of indirect conflict though diminishing opportunity selections, currently zero direct conflict and I hope to keep it that way. 
4. Best civ once all the cards have been drawn wins. 

Mechanisms:

On a players turn they can take one of three actions before always doing an upkeep:

1. Draw a card (or cards depending on their engine)
2. Play a card (or cards depending on their engine)
3. Discard a resource card on that turns location and take the appropriate resources. 

During upkeep the players will:

1. Gain or lose resources based on the Fatigue track, as well as from buildings and technology the player has researched
2. Freely add one (or more based on their engine) level to each active technology or construction cards as long as the appropriate costs can be fulfilled. 

Each card has four sections to it:

1. Name of the technology, building, or special action. 
2. Victory point value for completing the card.
3. Construction/Research track showing the levels and costs in actions and resources to complete the card.
4. Details of the technology, building, or special action. 
5. A set of resources, always having a number of ore and then a variety of two or three other specialized resources. 

Each player has a player board which let's them track:

1. Population cubes set in a tiered grid with the longest row on top and the lowest row near the bottom. Each spot along the rows has a population cube on it, and each row has a negative effect to fatigue on it based on how far down it is. First row is -1 per cube, second is -2 etc.
2. A zone to put population cubes that have been short term spent and will come back on the following turn.  Cubes will go here from drawing cards as well as completing construction/research.
3. three locations where resource dice will be placed, associated with the three resources in the game. Players will set the dice to equal their current amount that they have. Currently thinking they will be d10s.

Central Card row and Resource zone

1. Cards will feed out onto a sliding row with population cube costs associated with them.  The oldest cards will have the lowest population cube cost and the newest card will have the highest cost.
2. When a round is over, the oldest cards will slide off the track and into the resource zone.  In this zone the cards are rotated so that their resources are on the top instead of the bottom, and they now become available only to be taken as the "gather resource action".  The rest of the card is unused from now on and the card is discarded when a player uses it to gather.

Fatigue Track

1. A central theme of this game is that the more you are able to do, the more fatigued the player's population is going to be and this will set you back.  Almost every building made and most technologies will come with a negative impact on the player's fatigue level.  
2. The fatigue level directly correlates with turn order, so the less fatigued a player is, the earlier in turn order they will be able to play.  
3. There will also be resource and other penalties associated with dipping very far down the fatigue track.  This is to stall out run away leaders, since the better a player is doing the farther back in player order they will most likely be.

Turn order Rondel

1. This will be a Rondel with 8 or so slots in it.
2. Each player will have a piece associated with them on the rondel, no slot will ever have more then one player piece.
3. When establishing turn order, players will look to the fatigue track and start "leap frogging" their pieces to the very front of the rondel.  They will start with the player with the lowest fatigue.
4. If two players have equal fatigue then it is the player whose piece that was farther forward on the Rondel which leap frogs first.  This means that players with equal fatigue will alternate who goes first between them each turn for as long as they are on the same fatigue level.

That's a pretty good summary of where I'm at currently.  It feels good to have it written down, though I doubt it'll make much sense to someone reading it cold. I started writing this a week ago and have already revised this document significantly.

Mutation: starting to tighten this thing up

I had a couple productive playtests of Mutation yesterday, below is the feedback I received:

• Change removal rule to "Remove, then place. You can't place where you removed".  This is a far more elegant and simple rule to explain over the "only remove when adjacent to a chain of at least 2 dice" rule i've used for years.
• Variable end game condition, most likely first to 10 (value to be tested) or largest strain after 20 turns.
• Test a partner variant where you work together and win as a team when one of you has the longest strain.
• Work on 2 player game more.  
• Perhaps both players play two colors in much the same way a partnership game would play out.  
• Perhaps you roll four dice at a time (2 of each color) and place both on your turn.
• Asymmetric 2 player mode, one player is the bacteria and the other is an immune system or antibiotic fighting back. 
• Players have different actions available to them, bacteria spreads fast but the opponent is "Stronger" somehow.
• Tested some cardplay options. Nothing has really clicked yet, though I like the idea of a variant that uses card play to slightly modify dice and perhaps restrict double total numbers. 
• Tried 6 cards, one of each value, and you can spend them to induce a double or break the level 1 adjacency rule.
• Issues here are how it can slow down the game and potentially have odd stalemate moments where the first to spend the card will surely lose becasue the opponent can spend theres to come back and then both will lack the card and the second player will have the desired board position.

General consensus is that I DO have something here and it is close to done.  I just need to tighten up some of the rules, and increase the possible variant options to add value to the overall game.  There was also a feeling from everyone that Mutation isn't necessarily detracted by being a pure dice game.  I don't want potential customers to be turned off by the apparent lack of proprietary content.