At 2AM on a fine Wednesday morning, the Heartland team did a short playtest in the Mirrielees apartment with a group of three. Heartland is a game where players roleplay as farmers in the Central Valley, who are tasked with delivering the food necessary to supply the rest of the United States.
Every farmer fights towards reaching their quota, at which point the government endorses them as the lead supplier.
Figure 1: Image of playtesters playing the rough prototype of our game
Quotes from Initial Playtesting:
- “I’m going to weed your almond tree since it’s so close to finishing” (note on strategy)
- (when wildfire is drawn) “NOOOOOOOO my crops” (person a) — “this is pretty good now I can plant more” (person b)
- (when clear skies is drawn) “Oh that’s kind of chill though”
- “This game is fun, but it just needs balancing. I don’t want to pick up three different crops, and then be like, ‘ok'”
- (when high-speed rail construction work is drawn) “Oh fuck I’m protesting that”
- “Can I throw away my trees please? I have so many trees”
- (when compliance hold is drawn) “Hooray I can get rid of everything”
Problems we identified / changes we’re making:
- Problem: Players quickly accumulate crops in their hand, and can’t place them because of plot points
- Solution (done for next playtesting session): People draw two cards instead of three cards each turn
- Problem: Game isn’t chaotic enough to reflect the state of farmers amongst government regulation
- Solution (done for next playtesting session): Remove the “nothing happened” event cards (Legislative Recess and Clear Skies)
- Problem: People aren’t able to modify the state of others’ boards very much
- Solution (to be implemented): Add more offensive cards so players can set each other back
- Problem: The game stalls when plot points are full
- Solution (to be implemented): Consider some way of increasing plot point count when a farmer accumulates more money
- Balancing: Make Compliance Hold card apply to all cards (crops and resources)
- Balancing: Make Pesticide card remove bugs immediately rather than for the next three rounds, since this is hard to track
- Balancing: Make Protest card skip the current government event rather than the next one, since this is hard to track
- Balancing: For Wind Erosion event, keep drawing from the draw pile until you draw a crop. This is the crop type that is set back
