It’s all about play-testing. Playing and playing. Finding people (victims) to spend their limited time after work to do this with you is the real test, and luckily I have some rad people near me who don’t mind, but of course I don’t want to push my luck.
So after a few plays, we are still trying to figure out the second half of the game.
The first half seems to be quick and fun for everyone.
Each of us are Gods, we have a God card that a player takes, which may or may not have additional abilities associated with it.
There are 10 types of animals and 14 types of Mythological beasts that they can make. Yeah it’s alot but I wanted to try it, I’ll probably get down to 10-8 types of Beasts.
We are doing 1 round of a draft of 10 cards… which usually makes 3 beasts with some animals left over.
The leftover animals need a purpose and use in the game, I don’t want them to be waste, so I put some values on them and they can be used for re-enforcing our troops, once we get to Phase 2.
Combat! Phase two. Now we have our 6-7 cards of Beasts and animals in our hands and we are ready to go down to Earth and show these villagers who is boss!
I wanted to have location/land cards, each one has some modifier and the players then simultaneously select a location and if two players pick the same then there is some combat. This is where we need some work. Simply comparing power levels of the Beasts is not that fun, so we added some abilities; Fear, Flight,Intelligence and Seduce. That helps but still it’s missing something.
Adding some goats, snakes or women to the battle, is a little better, but it turns into who has the most cards will win. The strategy is very simple, so we need to fix that.
Things I’m thinking of are instead of obtaining the location, once you meet the requirements or defeat you enemies, your forces STAY there, and have loyalty to that land and your opponents must take it away in some subsequent round.
The game must have fun, fast and strategic conflict in Phase 2. This is where all the magic needs to happen.
Some players those will simply select an area where no opponent goes… where’s the fun in that? Maybe we try un-opposed lands, where there is no opponent player, have some other condition on the card that the player must meet, and maybe that is hidden so you don’t know what you will need to do to get the VP.
A lot to work out in this combat. Many ways to go. It’s starting to become an area-control board game and I need to make sure I reign this in to keep it a card game.
Next Time: More visuals and play-testing.