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.