playtest & road to 0.6

Two of my friends tried out the game for the first time while I took notes. They are experienced gamers and doctorates (albeit not in game development ; )  We used the 0.5 playtest ruleset, and afterwards we discussed the outcome. Getting questions by players, seeing their decisions and watching a game unfold is really invaluable for the game design. The only caveat is the time it takes and finding people to do it since I’m a bad playtest-dummy when I vs myself solo. If you happen to be interested in contributing by playtesting with me and have Steam/mic/english, please contact me and I’ll buy you the software in return.

Ahead to 0.6

My conclusions about what should be done in the coming version is based on their feedback and from what I’ve seen during that and other games this far. After this section a more detailed break down follows with the input and reasoning behind the decisions.

  • Clearer info: Reference sheets of heroes & hero difficulty marked out.
  • Countering cost: Correct counter card + removing the top 3 cards of the countering players deck.
  • Add predictability
    • Rebound is reworked. Nobody has to die to trigger it. It’s triggered by the players bad luck instead. Also, a dying hero gives 1 free equipment card.
    • Boosting failed checks is now made easier by just matching suit, not needing to also trump the number of the fail.
  • Supply drops & Gear
    • Scrap supply crates, replace by non-board Secret Shop, offering each player 3 unique items to choose among, each new round.
    • Remove possibility go get unlucky with gear by getting dad low-tier gear (by deleting bad items + choosing in shop above).
    • Remove the card cost when using gear once it has been acquired. Keep AP cost on some gear.
  • Raise movement a little
    • Invite to cover by adding slightly more obstacles should be on the board than the 13 squares we fill with them (=12%) if the board is made up of 108 squares
    • Lower baseline HP for each hero with 1.
    • (Possibly completing that by tweaking attack ranges and making them more varied across the heroes)
    • Make rough less punishing: Only first square of rough terrain costs 2 distance to enter, following squares that are in contact with it or any other square that is in contact with it count as 1 distance.
  • Remove the original art for the bat: Seems it is possibly illegal to draw original new art of something that even resembles Bruce B in his tight outfit , so we won’t do that. =  /

Newcomers

There is much to take in when playing the first game, in some regards comparable with many other games in the genre, in others it’s more complex than for example Dungeon & Dragons Boardgames due to such games having more symmetry and almost no complexity in the mechanics and skills used of characters, compared to each hero in this game having four unique and sometimes lenghty abilities, and on top of that in some cases also unique weapon abilities. Becoming good at the game or getting comfortable and knowing it takes a couple of plays with more or less the same heroes. At the same time, the game is still less complex than for example Dust Tactics or Descent, while still being at least as deep.

Playtesters suggested:

  1. Create easy to access and store reference sheets over what type of hero each one is and it’s basic stats. Keep color coding. [Yes]
  2. Grade heroes with a clear difficulty tag so that new players can easily pick newb heroes while learning. [Yes]
  3. Make the character sheets smaller than one a4 per hero. [Will try]

Supply drops

  1. Having to chase the box when it landed far away was never considered worth it, in part to:
    • Players not knowing what the box contained made it risky going for it’s content, in part to:
    • Players seeing that there was some “bad” loot also in the box.
  2.  Question came up how the drop location should actually be randomised (we opted for 3d6)

Playtesters suggested:

  • Sort out the crap items fromt the loot – it must always be tempting and worth it to chase the box.
  • Add a new type of gear that’s attached to heroes, boosting stats et.c.
  • Pick up loot by just passing next to the box, and not wasting a card to open it.
  • Scrap the box and replace it with 1-2 stores that appear at semi-random locations. They offer the player 2-3 choices of loot which the player buys with cards and can then use for free.
  • Create loot items that affect the heroe’s stats etc.

Dev input: Secret Shop

The supply box drop was initially included in the game as a means to

  • encourage movement
  • add another layer risk vs reward
  • making game shorter by raising the power/action curve

Subsequently picking up supply crates also presented an easy way to crate another win condition – the collecting and sellign of loot crates one.

In practice the supply crate hasn’t ever been a success in a single playtest. Usually the players would just ignore it, being busy with other stuff instead. It has been made easier time and time again to pick it up as the marginal costs for doing so was even steeper when it was first introduced. Again, the playtesting suggests it’s still too steep costs to gain something from it. Furthermore, the real issue seems to be the actual content in it. Removing the huge difference between good and bad stuff as potential supply drops is easy. Question is if that is enough to attract players more often to the box, and if there really needs to be a supply box drop system at all in the game.

Is that really the way to stimulate movement? If there wasn’t a box to run to, sometimes, and people aren’t moving their heroes without such an incentive, isn’t that a sure sign of something else, more essential, being broken in the game? I think it is. Furthermore, the drop of the box with the randomising never felt fluid, but more as a tacked on construct, some kind of ad-hoc solution to a basic more fundamental problem.

That’s why I’ll remove the supply box system. The incentives to move somewhat more in the game should still be there, but they will be created with other means instead (slightly more obstacles that may give cover, less problems with rough terrain, slightly less HP per hero, and if needed by, tweaking weapon ranges slightly). I won’t replace it with any system that somehow appears on the table: Totally or semi-random spots haven’t worked out that well and are also to some extent something that can be foreseen and met by the players, stimulating hotspots on the board on certain coordinates and leaves the rest less relevant, and that’s the opposite of what I envision for how the board should be used.

In comes the Secret Shop. The Shop opens it’s doors once every new round after the player has drawn their cards. It reveals 3 items to choose among to each player. The player may buy up to 1 item of the ones offered specifically to her there and then. The price is paid by discarding x cards from hand. Shop interaction can’t be countered. The limit of only being able to use a single item per round/player will also be lifted to stimulate shop consumption and shorter, more action filled, game time. Shop items can still be sold for victory points, where 2 items give 1 VP.

Creating equipment that is attached to heroe’s is something I won’t do as it further makes the game even harder to follow and yet more stuff to keep track of on the table. It’s already enough with the general equipment and the fact that you have to know 2 x 3 x 4 abilities well to play the game optimally. Adding yet another variable in the form of hero attachable equipment would just make it more complex without adding any real depth.

Discoveries from player actions

By parsing through just some basic data from play protocol (included below) we find out that:

  1. A players deck will be reshuffled once, at most, during a normal game that is around 7 – 10 rounds.
  2. The first 3 rounds had the most movement throughout the game.
  3. From round 4 up to round 8 (last round) there were a total of 4 moves in total done on the board.
  4. 31 attacks were made in total over 8 rounds (3,8 attacks per round)
  5. Abilities were used 10 times in total over 8 rounds (1,3 abilities per round)
  6. 21 moves  were made in total over 8 rounds (2,6 moves per round)

Dev. input: First timers

  • A normal game having just a single reshuffle demands discards from deck to be steeper than previously
  • Numbers for movement and attacks look like they are going in the right direction. but will vary greatly depending on heroes and playstyles.
  • Abilities were underused and should ideally be in the range of 2 to 4 per round on average, over many games, granted there are 6 heroes on the board.

Rebound

In 0.5 each hero got an ability marked R (short for rebound) that could be triggered once during the game, for free, when an ally to that hero died. The idea with adding it to the game was to prevent the run-away-lead-problem that many games suffer from and by doing that, try to keep the game exciting by still letting the losing player having some kind of chance of winning, albeit it be a lower one due to her just losing a hero.

In Saga.li I give the players a feeling of accomplishment most of the time even if they have bad rolls and miss an attack for example. I took those thoughts with me into TinySquad. I have an idea that “most of time you as a player should succeed with what you try to do in the game”, which is seen via the odds in a normal check, that has a 70% chance to succeed. Even the hard check isn’t that “hard” – it has a 48% chance to succeed, which is virtually half the time. Because of that very notion I have also made the counters hard to pull of, and using them also brings some uncertainty for the one that is countering (she removes her top 3 cards from her deck from the game).

Ever since I introduced the rebound mechanic the feedback has been positive about it. My only issue with it is that there’s this whole section on each character sheet, that only triggers once during the whole game, and it also fails to trigger at all for 33% of the heroes since they are doing the dying prematurely or being the last ones to die on their team and losing the game. Sure, the rebound opens up for some kind of comeback, potentially, but it’s still not present throughout the game. One of the playtesters expressed something in this direction when he stated that the rebound effects should be made more powerful, or at least the ones he happened to play with that particular game.

This is why the rebound will work differently in next version, more in line with how I do it in Saga:

  • Whenever the player fails any kind of check she will get 1 fate points (FP). Fate points are represented by counter tokens, a d20, or whatever. The player has one single pool of fate points that can be used to power any hero.
  • A heroe’s fate ability can be used by the player if the player pays it’s cost in fate points.
  • In addition, 5  fate points can be sold for 1 VP.

A player that has lost a hero will also get to pick one of the 3 offered equipment cards from the secret shop for free the next new round.

 

Collective HP-pool

The playtest was done with the idea that the player would have 20 HP which his heroes shared. When 7 of those were lost and the player got 13 or less HP, then one of his heroes would die. Which one was up to the player that was losing the hero to decide. This idea turned out to be bad since it made it more or less irrelevant who you attacked, and in some cases also with who you attack, which in turn lowers the need to move around or chase on the board. It also takes away incentives to try to gang up on a hero. It probably also lowers the need to use the cover system since it’s enough if a single hero happens to stay out of cover to punish all in team. Hence, the idea with a collective HP-pool has been scrapped just after a single playtest.

Misc.

Target group: They confirm the target group for the game is other people that are experienced and that it is no family game and wouldn’t try to let their partner play it.

Daenerys Dragon’s dogma ability needs a debuff by shrinking the panic range and remove some randomisation.

Ripleys wording of her rebound and weapon limitation of not shooting diagonally (whatever that is) should be reworded, simplified and made more intuitive. Her rebound should say it removes the weapon’s restriction instead, making the weapon function like all others.

Protocol

This section is here just as a reference and doesn’t need to be read by you for you to understand the sections above as it just functions as a logbook, so feel free to skip. J and I are abbreviations of their names. MOV is Move, ATK is Attack, ABI is the use of some non-weapon ability. Who hero 1 and 2 and 3 are varied since the players get to choose the order of which heroes they move each new round.

Round 1

Hero 1

J: MOV, Take crate –> +1VP

I: MOV, ATK

Hero 2

J: MOV, ATK

I: ABI, ATK

Hero 3

J: MOV, ABI

I: MOV, ATK

  • All heroes moved.
  • All except one attack.
  • None attacked or moved twice.
  • 1 of 6 heroes used an ability

Round 2

Hero 1

I: ATK, ABI, MOV

J: MOV, ATK

Hero 2

I: MOV, MOV

J: MOV, MOV, ABI, ABI

Hero 3

I: MOV, ATK

J: MOV, ATK

  • 4 of 6 heroes attacked
  • All heroes moved.
  • 2 of 6 used an ability
  • 1 hero dies

Round 3

Hero 1

I: ATK, ABI, MOV

J: MOV, ATK,

Hero 2

I: MOV, ABI

J: MOV, ATK

  • 4 of 4 move
  • 3 of 4 attack
  • 2 of 4 use ability
  • 1 hero dies

Round 4

Hero 1

J: ABI

I: ATK, ATK, ABI

Hero 2

J: MOV, ATK

I: ATK, MOV

  • 2 of 4 use ability
  • 2 of 4 move
  • 3 of 4 attack

Round 5

Hero 1

I: ATK, ATK, ABI

J: ABI, ATK

Hero 2

I: ATK, ATK

J: ATK, MOV

  • 4 of 4 attacked
  • 2 of 4 used ability
  • 1 of 4 moved
  • 2 hero die

Round 6

Hero 1

I: ATK, ATK

J: ATK, ATK, ABI

  • 2 of 2 attack
  • 1 of 2 use ability

Round 7

Hero 1

J: ABI, ATK, ATK

I: MOV, ATK

  • 2 of 2 attack
  • 1 of 2 MOV

Round 8

Hero 1

I: ATK, ATK

J: ATK

  • 2 of 2 attack
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