We are all Mad here

The rules editing for the Madness Place is finally calming down. The only change to the game's rules during the entire process was making it so that if you do an action it has to have an effect on the game's state for it to be a valid action.

The Flavor test has greatly improved as well:

They called you Mad, but could a madman have created a revolutionary living-brain extractor? Yes! You could, and you did it for SCIENCE!Not only did the fools not understand you, but The Tyrant even called you a criminal and sentenced you to repair The Citadel. A harsh sentence considering your ‘crimes’ were all for the furthering of science. No one has ever escaped this capricious, maniacal, homicidal, and irrevocably evil sentient castle.But, you will show them! After all, you were born with The Madness - a gift of supernatural understanding of all sciences. Build as many twisted abominations of science as is necessary to get the castle repaired so that you can earn your release from this thinking death trap.After that, make them PAY for their insolence!You WILL rule THE WORLD!

I have also been testing out the recent changes to some of the room cards, and I am pretty happy with the balance. Here is the coolest new room card: 
It isn't technically representing a room to repair, but an in-universe action that you could take to almost guarantee victory. Apparently the Tyrant came over to visit the prisoners in the Citadel, and you can assassinate him and throw his entire empire into chaos. It won't get you out of the Citadel for sure, but it probably will (assuming that you have repaired a few rooms already.)

Alison and I have played a few games with the new room cards, and the changes to the balance have been good. The dual cost rooms are cheaper, and the single cost rooms are more valuable, and everything seems to be working in a manner that keeps scores really close.

We did discover that we had too many time rooms in the room deck - a player with a pretty good hand and a really really lucky setup of room cards could win the game on turn 1, which was super annoying. There was about a 48% chance of your hand being good enough, and about a 1 in 1,400  chance of the room draft being good enough (you had to have 3 of the top 9 cards come from a set of 5 cards in the deck), but I have made it so that 7 of the top 11 cards would have to be exactly correct, and pushed the probability down to about 1 in 5,200,000.

It is still possible, but the chances are vanishingly small, and even if it happened, it wouldn't be obvious to a first time player how to take advantage of it. I think that it will not affect that many players of the game.

The reason why we noticed that this was a possibility was that I got a perfect set of three room cards showing up in one of our games by about turn 6, and won because of it. Alison still had a chance, but I had a better chance because I built a time machine and scored all of the high value time cards. For this to happen with the rebalanced room deck would take not just 3 of the time cards showing up, but all 7. If all 7 of any type of card showed up, the player that could score those cards would win for sure, so Time is not unusual in this respect any more.

In other news: I am still making icons, and also still making a playtesting website. The website is almost done, and the icons are a never-ending task, so I will never be done with them :)


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