I received my game back recently from my playtesters in Orlando. Turns out they only playtested it once, but I got some good feedback. Their biggest concern was wanting to have a community action deck instead of individual action decks. Not wanting to lose the individuality of the different characters - I came up with an alternative plan that will also help to increase the interactivity of the game and give players more choices - the "follow" card. Basically a player can play a "follow" card once per 3 raids and gets to take an action of another action played. The idea being that you want to use it when another player plays a special card in order to get to use their special. If you play it when no specials are played - it is wasted as you will be forced to flee or raid. This will introduce a bit of bluff to the action card play.
Castle Raiders Update
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Update - 10-29-08
I have been continuing development on Castle Raiders and testing it solo again. I did decide to go with a community action deck and instead each character only has one special action that is individual (the one-use). Another big change I decided to make is the way that weapons (raid value) can be increased. Instead of buying increases, players will earn automatic increases based on the number of glory point tokens earned. The reason I decided to do this is that I could dramatically simplify the forest hideout phase and get rid of the last remaining board in the game (making it strictly a card/token game with some reference material). During the forest hideout players now only have to decide which enhancement to buy, upgrade their enhancements if they can, and pay any remaining items to heal wounds. Players will get to draw cards from the action deck based on how many wounds they have remaining. So for example, a player who ignores healing and has 4 wounds does not draw an action card. A player who uses his items to heal and has no wounds would draw 3 action cards. Wounds left at the end of the game will cost players glory points.
I tested this new version solo and while it played very well, it still felt too easy. Without the boards, it felt more smooth to play solo with less fiddlyness. This should translate well to multi-player. I am going to ratchet up the difficulty a bit and test it again. The one problem with the glory points = raid value mechanism is that it will be very rare to ever achieve the 9 or 10 value without making the game even easier (which I don't want to do). I think wounds have to hurt more, maybe you get 2 wounds for failing a raid instead of 1.
Obviously I can't test the "follow" cards in the solo version - so that will have to wait until I can get another multi-player test.