A fix to the rooms of the Madness Place
Alison and I played a game of the Madness Place yesterday, and we had some changes to make after we were done. I am recording them here so that I remember them.
The game went well. We ended the game with me ahead by 2 points (15 to 13). Alison would have won in one more action, so it felt really tight. We played in about 45 to 60 minutes (we didn't record the exact times, but we put on a movie for the kids, and it ended about at the time that we were done discussing possible changes, which took about 45 to 30 minutes).
We agreed that the recent changes to the passing mechanism (the person that passes first gains an immediate +1 time energy on the following turn for every time they are skipped) seemed to be a good way to deter the player/players that are ahead from taking tons of extra turns.
We decided that the Citadel's Output mat should be double sided, and should have on one side printed a non randomized setup. This will help setup to be easier on the first few times playing the game.
We laid out the room cards and discussed possible ways of changing them to make the scoring work a bit better, and discovered that some of the card combinations were not actually represented the same number of times as others. This made building red/yellow or green/blue engines more powerful than any other combination. That might have been what Daniel was talking about when he said that the scoring felt "off".
We made changes to the rooms to fix this, and discussed the balance of the various room relative to each other. We also decided that the game should go to 16 points instead of 15 (if we changed the rooms like we said, since it introduced more high point cards into the game).
The game went well. We ended the game with me ahead by 2 points (15 to 13). Alison would have won in one more action, so it felt really tight. We played in about 45 to 60 minutes (we didn't record the exact times, but we put on a movie for the kids, and it ended about at the time that we were done discussing possible changes, which took about 45 to 30 minutes).
We agreed that the recent changes to the passing mechanism (the person that passes first gains an immediate +1 time energy on the following turn for every time they are skipped) seemed to be a good way to deter the player/players that are ahead from taking tons of extra turns.
We decided that the Citadel's Output mat should be double sided, and should have on one side printed a non randomized setup. This will help setup to be easier on the first few times playing the game.
We laid out the room cards and discussed possible ways of changing them to make the scoring work a bit better, and discovered that some of the card combinations were not actually represented the same number of times as others. This made building red/yellow or green/blue engines more powerful than any other combination. That might have been what Daniel was talking about when he said that the scoring felt "off".
We made changes to the rooms to fix this, and discussed the balance of the various room relative to each other. We also decided that the game should go to 16 points instead of 15 (if we changed the rooms like we said, since it introduced more high point cards into the game).
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