Yet Another Brain Dump

I took The Citadel of Madness to the Board Game Design Guild meeting, and played it again. This  time with entirely new playtesters, so I got to see what a first time player feels again. I asked for first time players, so I am glad that I got them.

Here are my notes (*** means that I am going to do these things first)

  • Level up converters?
  • Feels slow to take one action at a time
  • Keep track of who to pay?
  • Swap white cubes for brown***
  • End score: 17-1-2-6
  • Encourage people to build more machines - how?
    • Award points for more machines? ***
  • Hiding actions in rooms failed - the game is just complex
  • Drafting one card feels lame***
    • take multiple cards as an action ***
    • pay extra to take extra cards ***
    • free cards every turn?
    • drafting (or crappy actions) yield time
  • balance energy felt more valuable than others
    • remove balance
    • balance costs 2 generic energy
  • don't make start device give specific energy
    • starting device not able to upgrade?
  • minions that can upgrade
    • auto refresh minions
  • activate all your minions as an action***
  • upgrading is luck based?
    • dice for damaging machines?
    • repair damage
    • "failure is not an option"
  • build the citadel up from the bottom
    • high rooms cost more
    • only have devices = to number of rooms built
    • rooms attach to other rooms with color scheme edges
  • energy storage caps out so that you need to spend it ***
  • repair rooms at the end of turn
  • splitting machines
I have also been involved in a 2 player board game design competition which is currently in the judging phase. There is pretty much no way that I will win, however it made me work on the game, and that alone was worth it.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Skye Frontier

Image
I just played a work in progress by Seth Jaffee, so I thought that I would post about it here. The game called Skye Frontier right now. It is an Isle of Skye and The King of Frontier mashup. Since The King of Frontier seems like a Carcassonne/Puerto Rico mashup, this is a second order mashup. Anyway - the game was totally playable, and allowed for strategic decisions to be made. Alison went all out in combining multiple synergistic goals with building a good kingdom. I just went for a degenerate strategy of building the biggest lake possible and then producing and consuming in a cycle. After the game end we summed up our scores using the remaining money tokens, so you can see that I won by 6 points (78-84), so my strategy didn't seem too overpowered, however perhaps it should be nerfed a bit, since it was pretty powerful, and degenerate strategies (in my opinion) should be less powerful than well-thought-out ones. Here is the end state: the reasoning behind my strategy - spelled ou...
Read more

ChibiMob: A Review

Image
I was asked recently by Marc Di Stefano if he could use some quotes from me in his current kickstarter campaign. This will be the fourth time that I am quoted in a kickstarter campaign :). He also offered to send me a copy of the game that he is kickstarting, and since it arrived yesterday I played a few more games of it ( ChibiMob ) with Alison last night. We first discovered this game during a design contest (probably last year?), and have played it on and off since then. We were supposed to only play one game last night, but but we ended up playing more. I thought that I would write up a review of the game (I just backed it on Kickstarter , so this seems like a good time for a review). Overview: Chibi Mob is a light-weight* strategic card game with elements of drafting, hand management, action point allowance, something like deck building, and a small amount of 'take that' in the last few turns. *This game feels like an incredibly weighty light game. There are not ...
Read more

NaGaDeMon 2013 Day 18

Image
I have been having a hard time finishing my recent rules changes to Moar Moai. For one thing I want to cut out more of the game than I want to cut out (which basically means that I am conflicted about how much to remove.) The game works fairly well, but needs to be simplified to be played in the amount of time that I want to play it. Also, I have been spending a lot of time with Roguelike (and getting car repairs, but that is another story). I have printed up cards for Roguelike, tried to play it with my wife and found that in order for it to be playable a lot of impromptu rules had to be made. The game was crushingly hard (which was the goal), but I feel that to give it a more Roguelike feel there needs to be more equipment. I probably hurt less than ten monsters during the game because my wife and I had one sword between the two of us, and I was wearing the armor. We played a game of Ticket to Ride over the weekend with some light gamers. I don't love the game, but appreciate...
Read more