Three more playtests

On Friday I played another game of Skye Frontier with my dad (also Mike), brother in law (Dave), and nephew (Logan). My dad and nephew play games sometimes, but are not super big into the hobby, and my brother in law is moderately a gamer (he buys games and brings them to my game nights, but he doesn't play all of the newest games).

Logan started the game (and picked the blue castle), Dave was white, my dad was yellow, and I was red.

My dad and I ended up contending over the lakes, while Dave focused on building mountain regions, and Logan built some of everything. I couldn't get a shipping empire set up because boats were hard to come by, and Logan (and Dave) started grabbing cash at an alarming rate, so I instead focused on building up points using scrolls and by closing regions.

With a 1 point per sheep scoring tile out there, we all tried to get sheep, and the build for free action was used a lot. I capped off my regions just in the nick of time, and Dave ended the game (which I think was a mistake on his part, but perhaps he thought that he was doing better on the scoring tiles than he was)

The ending scores were: Logan 42, Me 40, Dave 35, and Dad 31

As a point of interest - I was the only one that got any points from scroll tiles - no-one else capped off before the end of the game. If Logan had, he would have gotten 6 more points.

There was one bit of rule ambiguity that we had to guess about in this game: When you have a tile with two plains on it separated from each other, and then you produce in both regions (the plain to the north and the plain to the south), does that tile get two green cubes or one?

Conversely, when you are selling goods from a tile with two plains on it, does the cube remember which plain it was produced on, or does it just sell off the tile no matter which area it was originally made?

They really liked the game, but our discussion about ways to change the game was not very long or full of things. Here are the ideas:

• Scroll tiles should always provide points even if they were in incomplete areas
• Make a score mat that you use to sum up your points at game end
• Make player aids that sum up the actions available and the bonuses 

After that I got together a game of the RPG that I am working on for the 18 card RPG contest. We had four players: Myself, Alison, Scott, and Sheila. We have played rules light RPGs before, and they enjoyed them so I figured that those two would be good playtesters for this game. Sheila really didn't want to play going into the game because she was tired, but once we started playing she seemed to enjoy herself.

To win the story we had to defeat an evil witch that was destroying a forest and lure her fire demon over to our team. The world was a crossover world between my neighbor totoro and howls moving castle.

I played a conceited immortal swordsman (modelled after a cross between Johnny Bravo and The Highlander), Alison played a street urchin thief that never had gone into the woods and who had a goat that was her nemesis, Scott was a conceited wizard (Howl), and Sheila was a forest spirit (totoro).

We started the game with Scott's and my characters singing a duet about how handsome we were, and becoming fast friends. Then the next scene was Alison's character being chased through the woods by a goat, and singing how she hated the woods. She was saved by the totoro - who preceded to convince her through grunted and growled lyric-less song (think pete's dragon) that the forest is actually good, and that totoro was her friend.

We discussed how we were going to get the two sub-parties together, and we decided that we should have the male character's get captured by the witch, and then the other characters rescue them (I am not sure the gender of totoro, so I can't say females). It seemed like a good plan, but it was bed time, so we ended the game.

We need to get the rules edited - this game is really good (for only having ben worked on for 1 month). The only things that we wanted to change were as follows:

• Add in a "dead parents" story part card - probably replace the "forbidden love" card. There is nothing like killing someone's parents off that screams "this is a kids movie", and forbidden love is too hard to force into an rpg.
• the self acceptance card has the wrong text. fix it.
• update the visual appearance of the character sheets. 

Sunday we played a game of Automatown. Three players played it: My dad, Dave, and I. Apparently I didn't remind them enough that the game ended when a certain point total was reached, because they were surprised when I ended the game, and they wanted a few more turns.

That is a common issue with this game - people get so caught up with getting abilities and building an army that they don't think to actually score at all. I wonder if the game would end like that less often if there were a countdown timer or something that pushes the players to start scoring. Then we could dispense with the point threshold, and instead just say that the highest score wins.

Dad commented that he wanted a copy of the rules in front of him since the game was complex, and also a player aid to decipher the symbols.

Multiple times Dave forgot to pay an extra scrap to upgrade a scrap to a level 2 resource, so I think that perhaps the upgrade ability should mention on each card that it costs a scrap, and, then that you upgrade a cube to another cube. Alternatively the player aid should spell that out.

the scrap is the only one that seems confusing because all of the others you pay 1 scrap and then move a cube, but with scrap you pay one scrap, and then discard a scrap and gain a cube on the "low quality" column.

If cubes were actually custom dice with sides that had pictures of the resource types then you would just move the scrap cube to the board and rotate it to the correct facing, so perhaps that would be a good solution to make them all the same. That would also make the swap action easier - don't discard a cube and gain another cube in the same column, but instead just change the face of the die.

This would be ok unless someone bumped the table. The game already had issues with bumping the table, so perhaps this isn't a really good idea.

if you wanted to go all out, a d10 could hold all of the resources in the game and all of the quality levels as well, so you could dispense with the mat entirely if you did that. Again - bumping the table would be a nightmare in that case, because d10s easily roll.

I guess another option would be cubes and colored dice which you change the face to show how high quality the components are.

I need to reprint this game and bring it to the board game design guild - they say that they are starting meetings up again some time soon, so I should see if I can fit it in my schedule.