Friday, March 7, 2014

New Game Design - Ready for another Test

I now have version 0.0.6 of my game ready for another test.  I made all of the changes that I had mentioned in the previous post (word clarifications and some more player interaction). 

I also took some time to make calculations of the advantage a player would have if they skipped building in Year 1 to build a max Worker force to collect resources and build the best buildings in the last 2 Years.  The results were not good.  It looked that that strategy would win by nearly 20 points!  After seeing the result, I immediately went to find ways to weaken the strategy while not hurting anyone else.  I believe I have made some changes to address that, and look forward to seeing how close the game is now (it should be within 5 points -- but with some new event cards, it could be 0).

Here's the items/rules that have changed/added since the last playtest:
1) A new Traveling Stage Coach that moves to a different town at the end of each turn.  This allows all players to move Workers around without having to build a card that provides this ability (more player interaction).
2) Word clarifications on many cards.
3) Adjusted the average Citizen Point values of most buildings in each Year.  The average points/building is now 3.0 in Year 1, 3.9 in Year 2, and 5.0 in Year 3.  In addition to these changes, I also adjusted the Upgrade values for the Year 3 buildings to limit the Citizen Points awarded (this is where the max Worker strategy gained the highest advantage).
4) Removed the resource limits.  Until now, there would be a limited number of each resource (except food) noted on the resource board at the beginning of the game (based on number of players).  This had to be removed because of the max Worker strategy (they would take the majority of resources, thus leaving the other players with no resources to collect in Year 3).
5) Replaced and added some Event Cards.  Due to removing the resource limits, 2 event cards were no longer needed.  These have been replaced with events that force all players to lose nearly all of a single resource type they have (there is one for Wood, Stone, and Gold).  This should also help limit the advantage of the max Worker strategy.
6) There is a slight tweak to end game scoring.  With the addition of the Traveling Stage Coach, it is now possible to players to have some workers that are not in any town at game end.  To mitigate this issue, players will now lose points at the end of the game for each worker that is not in a town.

I hope that I can get this tested at SWIC tomorrow, but I am not going to hold my breath.  There is a special guest that will be visiting with a game that I really want to try (and will hopefully post about soon).

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