Friday night playtesting/Quick test today

Friday night was a bit hectic (I was still finishing preparing things when people arrived - I probably shouldn't have made pieces for two games at once), but things settled down and flowed somewhat smoothly in the end, I think.

This was the first game of Trishula I'd played where I was not the Invaders. Kaly took on that role. It was interesting to see someone else at the helm, particularly since she made some "obvious" mistakes. The most likely reason she made these mistakes was being unable to track who was going next, and move to the appropriate places to minimize her impact. I might add a little track to the Invader player aid to make this potentially easier. The other, more major changes will be changing how the Trishulans get their primary resources (based off Cumulative rather than Species aggression); and that the game will last only 7 rounds. 5 Actions is likely too much of a maximum, will cut it off at 4 (only at the highest Aggression level) and will change the Aggression thresholds. The game keeps "working" for about 2/3 of the playtime, and then suddenly things get static, and hopefully this reduction will both keep things very challenging for everyone as well as reduce this static-nature. The Morale cards played a nice role in this session - the Invaders lost by 1 unit due to them. Although Kaly "should" have been able to win easily, by my count - the Trishulans were killing each other a little too much. We also didn't get to see the new flipping-aggression mechanism more than 2-3 times, which should improve with a change in Aggression thresholds.



I also got to try the new one, Hand of God (previously referred to as Perfect World), on Friday with Seth, in a quick 2-player game. The first sessions were relatively disastrous; having 10-max levels and being able to play 4 cards at once is too powerful. Played it again quickly with Anna again this morning after breakfast (it's such a fast game, less than 10 minutes), using a rule of playing 2 cards maximum on your own board at once. Things flowed much more smoothly with this, although the first blue spot became a horribly easy pocket in which to find yourself.

Two changes for next time:
-Allow the deck to reshuffle: with all of the changing timelines, the number of cards provided is too few - we ran out of orange cards, for example, where that particular set is crucial to the game. I'd at least reshuffle the discards in, if not allowing the whole deck to be reshuffled when out of cards. The cards on offer would fall under the same category, because no one wants a blue when the greens and oranges just came out.

-Make each space "worth" a certain number of cards. For example, there is a pocket of 3 blues very early in the game. If the first one cost two Blue to play, the second 3, and the third 5 (ending the timeline), then falling into that pocket would be incredibly more difficult to obtain (particularly given the hand limit). Meanwhile, the chain of 4 yellows on the left might be relatively cheap to get to, although going to areas of less points.

I might also want to consider a way to throw away a large number of cards at once, since one can no longer play more than 1 card onto someone else's board. The board itself is preliminary, and needs restructuring.

One nice thing about a game this short is that you can playtest it very quickly and improve things swiftly. Initial impressions seem to be positive, although the game is still rough enough to have not worked properly. The decaying timeline mechanism is fun.

Just had one interesting thought - forcing a player to correct the timelines before they can advance their own. So if a single yellow just got played onto your board, you would have to play your own yellow before playing on your own board, otherwise your original path decays. Possibly too random and could make games take half an hour; too long for this one.


I'd really like to try Indonesia, it seems mildly similar to Delivery, but only on the surface perhaps? Maybe we'll do some league of six and then see if we can't try Indonesia on Monday. If not, Anna and I will have to give it a go sometime in the next week, although I suspect it plays best with more players.