Sunday, December 18, 2011

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.

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