A look at our experiences play testing this early version of ZetaRanger.
To provide an overview once more of the board game I'm designing, ZetaRanger is a medium-light worker placement and dice-combat game where players are building their own group of 'Power Ranger' style superheroes to complete missions and fight monsters with the goal of becoming the heroes of Wall Town.
To compile the prototype that we've been using to play test, I whipped up a functional game board in Illustrator, as well as player score pads representing each of four special ranger teams and their special powers, and a set of oversized monster cards that represent the most dangerous enemies in the city. The board was then printed out, mounted on foam core and cut to ten by ten inches.
Additional components were assembled using uniformly cut cardboard for recruit cards, HQ cards and encounter cards. The original recruit and HQ cards assembled have since been replaced with smaller, more easily readable versions of those cards with clearer iconography. The encounter cards have been replaced entirely with small tokens, as the cards we had used previously proved too cumbersome.
Although cardboard components were assembled for all in-game tokens and markers (of which I'm trying to reduce or remove as many as I can to help streamline gameplay), we ended up using meeples and tokens from other games instead as they were more easily distinguishable on the game board.
Play tests so far have yielded valuable feedback, with most sessions comprising of moments like these;
'This mechanism isn't quite working, do we even need this?',
'Oh that's neat, but we should streamline this',
'This part doesn't work, let's try this instead!',
and also, although more rarely, moments like this;
'That was really fun! Let's figure out why that worked!'.
The parts that were fun, by the way? Having the right combination of rangers necessary to complete mission cards and score points, and engaging in the monster 'boss' battles where all players use their ranger teams to confront the more dangerous enemies before they destroy the city. That latter bit I'll be exploring in depth during a subsequent post, and was also the initial idea that spurred the entire design. :)
