Will adding ability cards to a resource collection game overwhelm players? Will they be too focused on their pizza to pick fights with other players?
- We need to know if our attempt to make players interact with each other might fail if the players decide to keep themselves the whole game and rarely interact.
- We would probably need to run multiple playtests where players cannot interact through card abilities and scale the playtests by slowly adding new ability cards
- We would also have to determine if sabotage abilities are more exciting for players than abilities that help yourself or introduce some chaos (i.e. clearing the board of ingredients)
- I imagine that players mostly keep to themselves until someone “fires the first shot” or makes themselves a target by moving too quickly into the lead. We would then need to figure out how to get players “shooting.”
What is the best approach to winning the game? How can we let players know if their peers are winning or losing?
- We need to know if players prefer to work on one pizza throughout the game or if they would prefer to submit multiple pizzas so other players can see how they’re progressing. These two approaches would significantly modify how the game is built.
- We must prototype these different approaches and judge if players approach the game the way we intended. Our goal is to get players interacting, so some visualization of progress must likely be evident to create leverage for players to team up or attack each other. We could also take a more subtle approach like Uno, where progress is simply gauged by how many cards each player has.
- We would likely need players to make multiple pizzas or create their pizzas publicly so that other players can see how the opponents are doing before deciding how to use their cards and/or points.
Is dice the best way to determine currency points? Is this too complicated over having players just draw a card every turn?
- We need to know if using random chance to determine currency leads to unfair outcomes as the game progresses and if we could replace it with something more fixed, like in Coup.
- Prototyping would involve play testing with dice, even if it just involves test runs without cards, to see how points are distributed over the course of, say, 10 rounds. Our goal would be for everyone to be within a certain range of points in every game and to determine how many rounds would take, given the number of players.
- We predict that because dice rolls are truly random, we will have a normal distribution of currency, with the standard deviation decreasing as more rounds pass.
