The retheme that went right

On Friday my wife and I played Akrotiri for the first time in a few years. It is a really fun two player game. We were both doing well until the end when I pulled ahead to win by a large margin. I usually lose to my wife in such games, so this was a surprise ending. We had a fun time, and will probably play more in the near future.

Yesterday we played Hanabi at lunch, and we lost all three games. It is fun to play a cooperative game with these guys (since they usually love traitor mechanic games). They liked it so much that we played a game at lunch again today.

We played another game of "Grab the Loot!" last night, and also today at lunch. The game (at lunch) took 23 minutes, and people seemed to like the new changes. Dwayne (who is usually not happy to play one of my games twice in a row) even wanted to play a second game immediately. That is a win if I ever saw one.

In this retheme I made changes that were much larger than I usually do when I am retheming things. I would almost even call this an entirely new game - though I completely retained the scoring mechanism from "The Dragons' Game". The number of choices available to a player is pretty high during the game, and the game is not nearly as complex as it used to be. I think that it is moving in an excellent direction.

I also just found some notes of mine that I took while playing "Terran League of Defense Robots" at SaltCon. Here are the notes:
  • Tech tree?
  • Tech is too complex
  • Lower the space on chassis until it becomes a difficult constraint
  • Make the market a draft?
  • Make the research a draft?
  • Divide the decks into tiers
I was playing with Glen Dresser (Ion award winner 2016), Charles Allen (Ion Award Finalist 2015), and Nick Keil (a BGDG admin). They thought that the tech could be simplified, and that the puzzle aspect was not difficult enough when fighting easy monsters. They also talked about changing how foes come out so that the alien's turn can be played faster.

I need to create and incorporate these changes, but I don't have that much time until the contest ends, so I won't update rules with the changes from this until I am sure that they are working well.

Before I do that, I am going to the BGDG meeting tonight to probably play another game of "Grab the Loot!", and get more feedback on it.

I also need to reprint a new version of "The Perfect Moment" with my last changes to the cards. That game is coming along quite nicely. 

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