V3 playtest [11/10]
I playtested on 11/10 during office hours. All of the players had substantial knowledge about gentrification; most enjoyed some kind of long-form gameplay. This version of the game came on the heels of a playtest done in class. My main objective was to move our game beyond a puzzle-like game to instead being a system. Thankfully, the rule changes we made did in fact achieve that. The following
Key Takeaways from Playtest:
Mechanics
- Can change roles from developer vs residents to landlord v grocery store vs educators vs cultural stewards (or parks & rec)
- The points economy needs a lot more balancing.
- How do the resources contribute to game play? Could the tiles just have certain buffs pertaining to each role?
- Residents should have more interaction other than just placing tokens.
Materials
- This game needs to be higher fidelity.
- Laser cut the board & tiles out of wood
- Individual tokens should specifically list 1, 2, or 3, in order to remove the need for having dozens of tokens on the board per player
- 3D print small models to show gentrified/highly gentrified/others
- Make the board squares, not hexagons
- Can use adjacency through streets, such as connecting vertically or horizontally providing extra buffs.
- For the individual tiles, add buffs that include buffs or gameplay mechanics for claiming that tile
- Make sure that the colors are color-blind friendly, because right now, they are not.
- Maybe make the tiles say organized -> unionized, not protected. Remove the vulnerability to developer for unionized, similar to highly gentrified.
Rules
- Whichever resident goes last has a heavy disadvantage in comparison to other residents. We should figure out different ways to balance that, either with all residents go at once or there are buffs on the tiles they claim that equalize the efforts/incentives.
- Both teams should have the ability to flip the tile someone else has claimed. They can’t flip past the second tier.
Emergent Gameplay
- In the playtest in class, I saw the residents acting more as gentrifiers, and the developer playing defensively by stacking tokens as soon as residents attempted to claim a territory.
- In the playtest in office hours, players decided to challenge the developer more in order to try to spend the developer’s tokens.
- The most fun as of now was when the resident was playing rock-paper-scissor against the developer.
