Of Power & Glory

Someone played Of Power & Glory and had a bad experience with it.  As I understand it, in their game, 3 kings were killed very early.  Of the remaining five kings, two were small and therefore not involved in many battles.  The other 3 kings had all of there titles taken so the game ground to a halt.

I suspect this is a rare situation since I've never encountered it, but I do want to do something about it.  My current solution is to make the following rule change:
If a King needs to expand into a territory and there are no rings left, but there are rings on some of the nobles in his court, take a ring from the noble in the 1 position.

If that rule were in place, then the game would not have ground to a halt.  The three big kings would continue to expand as the title collected from them by the players get eaten up.  Here's a little math on the subject:  there are 24 territories and each King has 9 rings available for expansion.  So with only 3 kings, that's enough for all 24 territories (and then some).  Even if you only had 2 kings, that would be enough for 18 of the territories.  And if there was only one King... then the game has bigger problems.  I'm not sure if I should protect against that or not.  It may be such a rare thing that I don't worry about it.

Post Atlanta Gamefest

Well, I've taken a long time follow up.  Sorry about that!  The gamefest didn't go as I expected...  I went in hoping to spend the whole time playtesting my games and it just didn't happen like that.  I did get one game of Of Power & Glory and I started playing Of Feast & Famine with a player who wasn't really into it.  I also explained Quintavox to a few people... but that's it.  But I did get a bit out of it.  Here's what I learned:

Of Power & Glory
I got a good suggestion to add marks at the top of the board to indicate where the cards should go and also indicate the three ones that are active for the round.  Someone also said that they thought the Espionage favor was under powered.  I'll wait for the review from the Gamer's Table to make any official changes (because I might have a lot more!)  but I'm pretty sure I'll at least add the card marks.

Quitavox
Two people both suggested a change in theme.  So for the umpteenth time, I've switched it back to Political Agenda set in the US in modern times.  I've work mainly on this game lately...  the map has 29 states so there's a little poetic license going on there.  I also added a new concept "Lobbyists" to the game.  It's something I've had in the back of my mind for a while, so I decided to run with it.  Another big change:  I decided to let players use the Senate backwards.  That is to say that they can move down in the Senate a get action points back.  The Senate can now serve as sort of a repository of action points.  But it's not guaranteed because another player could just jump over you.

Of Feast & Famine
I've got the most work remaining with this one.  The game just didn't work.  But there is still hope for it...  in fact I'm still optimistic about it.  The main problem was that the was no requirement to build up to oncoming threats.  So your enemies are getting closer and closer and you don't have to do a thing until they're right on your doorstep and then move everyone into the barracks.  So here are the changes to help address that:
Now, workers can only be added to location unstacked.  It requires an additional action later to stack them.  I would love to have an easy way to ensure that that happened in another season, but as of yet I don't have one.  This makes some thematic sense.  But this means that the workers can't come back to a starting location each season.  The reason I like doing that is that it gave players something to do every turn.  Now I'll have to find other ways to do that.  To that end, I've decided to add gold to the game.  Gold is exchanged to and from Food, Stone and Medicine.  You make gold by taxing the workers which they don't like.  So I needed to have some for them to do when they get mad....  which is that they go to "the fields" (a new location) and they can't be moved until you have a "Faire" (another new location).  I'll have to see has these changes go...  if there's still not enough for each player to do I'll have to come up with more!

Other News:
Bradfield Acres was a finalist in the resource contest, but it didn't win.  What hurts a bit is that the notes from the contest were released and it was seen as the least fun of the finalist games.  Ouch.  Oh well,  live and learn!

Atlanta Gamefest

Just a quick post here to let you know that I'll be going to Atlanta Gamefest for the next few days.  I hope to playtest a lot of my games and get new ideas!  I'm sure I'll have more to post later!

SoothSay

I've been working on a new game that's very different from any of my others.  It's called SoothSay and it's only a game in the loosest of terms.  Basically I wanted to create something similar to a tarot deck or an Ouija board and then turn it into a party game to give it more mass appeal.  But really, the game is just an excuse to take part in an activity that (hopefully) is a little creepy. 

The "game" is for each player to take turns playing the soothsayer.  The soothsayer picks another player to ask a question, then the soothsayers performs a reading to answer the question and all other players vote yeah or nay on  the performance.  The question asker serves as a tiebreaker if one is needed.

The "reading" is where all the fun is and it's still being designed, but it relies on the use of a deck of hex cards.  Each card has a letter in the center along with a number.  Along the 6 edges are astrological symbols in either white or green.  The "rules" of the reading are that you shuffle the deck and deal out cards and try to match them up with other cards so that the touching edges have the same symbol in the opposite color.  But the soothsayer has a lot of room for interpretation...  A LOT of room.  I'll provide an interpretation guide, with all sorts of loosey goosey rules on interpreting the reading.  The deck is designed to maximize the odds of spelling something in English while still seeming like your placing cards according to rules that the soothsayer can't change.  Each card also has a color to it so the reading could come from the letters or numbers or colors or the shape made by the cards or anything else that the soothsayer dreams up.

I've ordered a copy.  I'll play it a see what I can come up with.

Another post Quitavox playtesting post

Playtested Quintavox again.  The Senate change worked well.  We came up with a few additional changes or at least, things to try.

First, the easy one:
Some one pulled a Protection card card and accidentally called it "Justice."  But I think I like the word "Justice" a lot better so I changed it.

There was a suggestion to limit the number of rings in the game when playing with fewer than 5 players.  Which I think was brilliant.  The specific suggestion was to have the same number of many rings of each color as the number of players.  And since each player has 4 pawns that can each take 2 rings, that's 8 rings per person and there are 8 issues, so you would have exactly enough rings to go around no matter how many players you had.  This is a very elegant solution and I might very well go with it, but I had a different but related concern that may change this a bit.  The other concern was that even with 3 players, there was a lot going on..  almost too much to keep track of.  And if you had 2 more players, it might be a bit too chaotic.  So I was thinking limiting the number of pawns you get to 3, but allowing each one to campaign 3 times.  But that's 9 rings per player not 8.

So the next I play, I'm going to try both changes at the same time which means, that there actually be less than enough rings to go around.  That might be a good thing as it give the game a little more drama, but it might also unbalance the game.  But I'm thinking it will actually improve the game.  Each player could only take one more ring than his share, so it's not like one player could go crazy taking rings left and right.  The player it affects most is the one hanging back and watching how things develop (which looks like the winning strategy by the way).  But that player has the benefit of choosing his rings with more knowledge.  Half the rings are pointless anyway.

Another thing to consider is this:  Which rings do you remove in a fewer than 5 player game?  My current thinking is to remove the "1" rings in a 5 player game and the "1" and "5" rings in a 3 person game.  Incidentally, I'm becoming less convinced that the game will work for 2 players.  But since, I have yet to play it with 2 players... who knows.  So for 2 players I suppose I would remove the "1", "4" and "5" rings.

A post Quitavox playtesting post

I playtested Quitavox this week.  It played well.  There were a few critiques, but they were all minor.  The first one was that the color assignments for the 8 issues should be changed so that opposing issues had opposite colors.  I actually intentionally didn't do this originally because I was worried about making a political statement with my game by making some issue black and its opposite issue white.  But I decided that game play was more important so I changed colors to make more sense.  I tried to pick the least controversial issues to be black and white:  Expansionism (Black) and Isolationism (White).

Then there were a few issues that I believe I have all addressed (at least partially) with the same change.

• The game ended in a tie and I hadn't come up with tie breakers yet, so we made up one on the spot, but it was rather complicated.
• There was often 1 action point left over that players couldn't do anything with.
• The first person to play has a bit of an advantage
• Tiebreakers for control of a county are a bit complicated.

So here's the change:  I added a little section on the board called the Senate.  There are 5 spaces there and a cube for each player.  The order of the cubes is used as a tiebreaker for both county control and the end of game.  Players can, for 1 action point, swap any two adjacent cubes in the Senate.  The order is initialized to be in inverse turn order. 

Of course, I'll have to order a new copy of the game, but I'll wait until after Monday to do that because I have another playtesting possibility then.  But overall, the game played well.  I think it maybe close to done.  Though I do have to admit, that when playing it, I felt like it was missing something.  I'm not sure if the Senate addition is it or not.  I guess we'll see.

Of Feast & Famine

The game that I used to call Cheshire's Kingdom is now called Of Feast & Famine.  I suppose that makes it a "sequel" to Of Power & Glory.  I've actually been thinking about a third one in the line called "Of Intrigue & Inheiritance", but I'll save that for another blog.

I got my first copy of OF&F in yesterday and playtested it with my wife.  I'm actually a bit surprised how well it did by the time I was done tweaking stuff.  Don't get me wrong, there's a lot left to do, but the game was fairly playable.

So here are the things I changed or clarified from my first playtesting (all of this is subject to further change):

• The peg pawns that I thought would stack... don't.  So I'll just have to use cubes.  It will cost $1.00 more, but I'm not as concerned about that as I am the more clumsy feel of the game.  Actually it wasn't too bad with cubes, but I was really hoping for parts that stacked more naturally.
• In a one player game, you use 3 pawns.  In a two player game, each player uses 2 pawns.
• I need
• The game starts with 5 workers in the castle and 5 rations.
• You now seed the game with 5 disasters by rolling dice at the start of the game.
• It costs 5 rations to create another worker.
• A feast costs you 1 ration an 1 worker must go to the castle.
• Plague cause workers to go to the calendar 1 season ahead.  The basis for choosing how many people get sick is half of the Well workers (rounding down).
• If you have a feast when the rations are at 0, a worker dies...  and another 1 must go to the castle.
• the "castle" disaster is now called "feast".
• You no longer repair all buildings from the workshop...  the workshop is just for the long term projects.  To repair a building you must go to that building and repair it explicitly. I'm still a little up in the air as to whether 1 action repairs all damage to a building or just one cube....  I'm leaning towards one cube.
• I'm on the fence about whether or not to limit the number of times an action can be performed.  I think I need to do that, but I didn't play that way yesterday and it was ok.

Other observations:

• The enemies were way too easy...  I spent my time dealing with the other problems and then realized, "I could just attack my enemies and win"  I'll have to make them a much bigger concern.  Perhaps be moving their numbers closer to 7.  Perhaps by seeding their hostilities (this might be a difficulty adjustment as well).
• I need to change the role cards to indicate the color of the pawn that is used.
• The board looks great!

That's all for now!