Working on TLDR again

Last night I played a game of Terran League of Defense Robots with Alison for our date night. We turned up the difficulty and included two Motherships in the game, and I found it to be a very satisfying victory. We are getting quite good at that game.

We added in ideas from last playtest, and found them to mostly work well. Here are what we changed, and what we thought about it:

  • The minions are now integrated into the foe cards - They are on play abilities that add a "Minion" cube to the tile. Minions fight as a block, and deal (and require) damage equal to their count. They take any damage type as full damage (even generic).
    • This felt pretty good. The minions were hard to fight, but not overpowering. The real game will want minion tokens that are like coins with a pow symbol on them.
    • The mothership's minions and her escort's minions combined to make a stack of 14 minions. That is practically unkillable. We decided that the mothership should summon minionless escorts. 
  • Technology cards are now a draft that slowly cycles if you don't pick them. You can pick each turn the card that leaves the draft, so you can hold a tech indefinitely if you like it but can't afford it. Having scientists in your lab lets you have more cards in the draft (you start with three), and you still spend scientists out of your engineering bay to build techs.
    • This worked fairly well. Some of the cities and characters don't make sense any more. I need to fix that.
  • We also decreased the space that each chassis provides - basic lost 2, normal lost 1, and tech didn't lose any.
    • This made me personally feel the space requirements more keenly. I think that it worked out.
We decided that the aliens should still be able to damage a city if you are not properly defending it, which means that you need to engage the entire stack if you don't want the city to slowly get destroyed.

I have also been working more and more on Grab the Loot. I am really excited about that one (mainly because it is so easy to playtest it, since it can be played twice at work during lunch.) Multiple times my co-workers have specifically requested that game as the game that we play at lunch, which is pretty rare. Once the survival contest is over, I will probably work on GTL for a while.

I have also been working on The Madness Place a bit, and it is nearly ready to playtest again. I hope that this time I have made the game work better, and not be so fiddly.

I have been wondering if I should reduce the number of energy types in the game. It would make the problem of always drawing the wrong thing less likely to occur.

Finally, I have submitted The Perfect Moment - my entry to the Button Shy wallet games contest. I think that it is pretty good, and like how it turned out. Hopefully Jason feels the same.

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