Playtest Notes - Jan 24, 2024
- Goal of today was to force shared knowledge of cards to be drawn by drawing 3 tiles and having each player select one and revealing their choice simultaneously. We did this for a couple of reasons:
- to force players to be aware of what the opponent's options will be
- to lessen load of players that don't know cards by reducing total number of cards to read (we had originally given each player 2 independent options, which meant there was no necessity for a player to know what their opponent could be picking; we changed it to the pool of 3 shared options, which means duplicate tiles will be required sometimes, but the play enhancement was definitely worth it)
- to force interaction by thinking about developing your own future game vs. interfering with your opponent's future game
- We settled on processing the MW on each hex and the join between each hex, linearly orthogonal (and in order of proximity to MW simultaneously); this goes against the literal flow potential (by having flow be due to tile connectedness, but this led to a bunch of questions about when multiple cards are touching, so we opted to keep it simple, at least for now)
- We decided that hexes can grow infinitely orthogonal to the MW, but not extend past the source/sink (what happens if the source/sink get nearer or farther apart from each other, if this becomes a mechanic? it'll be fun to figure it out if it becomes a thing!)
- It was fun making our decisions in private, then explaining our reasoning after the reveal. We discovered our strategies were the same (with slightly different reasoning) with picking tiles for the first two waves, differed for placement immediately, and then tile selection started to diverge starting at the 3rd wave.
- We forgot pennies as counters again. We need counters for population and soulstain at this point.
- An outside observer watched, we gave a quick tour of the concepts, and then they were able to (we think) follow along and ask good, meaningful, clarifying questions
- Due to needing a duplicate tile sometimes, we started marking one copy of each tile "uniquely" so that on setup, the setter upper only needs to look for the mark to assemble the initial stack of tiles.
- Expanding on one of the original concepts to deny an opponent a tile instead of taking one for your own, we thought of a mechanic where a tribe might give a player denial currency if a soulstain threshold were crossed.
- Electronic documentation/assets was useful and might be worth expanding upon to keep making playtesting simple, easy, and focused on game mechanics and flow, not needing assets.