Prototype Iteration
(preliminary rules sheet here: use Stanford email)
From the playtest in class, we observed that the negotiation-based and quest-based gameplay had a few flaws. Firstly, the player who would fall behind in power would be unlikely to catch up because it would be suboptimal to work with a weaker player for quests. This led to a self-reinforcing feedback loop where the weaker player would stay weak and excluded from the game. The spinners also had a ton of output randomness — passing or failing a quest was entirely up to the roll of the spinner. We felt that this created two potential dynamics: either players don’t tackle quests until they can clear it with 100% certainty, or they feel frustrated when they end up failing a fairly likely roll.
In light of these issues, we changed the game to more of a free-for-all individual versus individual game. Players now instead individually make discoveries, which contribute to the corpus of scientific knowledge on the board and eventually lead to a big era-defining invention. Instead of output randomness, our spinners now generate tokens, so the player can at least plan around the number of tokens they have. We also added a couple of different scoring mechanisms for different strategies: playing one big card, playing many small cards, and capitalizing on other people’s willingness to play cards.
In an internal playtest, we formalized some of our discovery cards with discovery costs and point scoring, and we tried to balance some of the numbers before bringing it to class.
Questions
- A lot of our troubles came from figuring out how to create interesting win conditions. The current version of our game has multiple ways to score, but it’s not an engine builder. I wonder if there are any interesting games you guys have played with multiple fun routes of gaining points that don’t revolve around building engines?
- We want the players to design their own variance as part of the game by modifying their spinners however they’d like. But they can choose to make poor choices like making a super risky spinner. How much of self-inflicted player frustration can we realistically mitigate while still keeping this central mechanic?
