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June test session

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Johan
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Hi

This weekend I went to a game convent and got a lot of games tested. Some of them where mine and some was from other persons (I had 17 games with me and 8 of them where mine).
A friend was going to help me, but he become sick so I was not able to test all the games (I had to drop some games). I was still able to run tests for more then 27 hours in a 3 day event. (I also played a lot of other games) with between 40-50 gamers.

The tested prototype games where: Pirates trust (2 times), Sands of time, Darebase (around 10 times), Devils deeds (10+), Last rat standing, The siege, Dragon attack, Chicago, Art attack, Knights glory, Feeeeed Meeeee and finaly Build and Plunder.
For you that had a game included in the test, the result will be presented the way we agreed on and I will do that during this week.
If you know that we agreed on a test and it is not on the list, It will be tested July 2 (I had to drop some games)

// Johan

Johan
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June test session

Lets start with Sands of Time.

We played this game one time with 4 players. No player had play this game before. We used the new map but not the quick set-up. I explained the rules and then was I only observing and helped with rule questions.
After the game, we had nearly no time to talk about the game (they where on there way to the next event), so this is more my opinion from observing. I had also another group going so I did not see everything.

The overall impression where "OK but...".

Strong parts:
- There where no rules that failed (when we had a situation and looked it up, the rules where there).
- The action selection mechanism is the strongest part in the whole game (you can only the same action once in a turn and that action will exclude another action). I think that the mechanism is what does this game unique among civ. games and make the game interesting.
- You have always a choice on the actions (this is no game that play itself).

Week parts:
- Still the downtime between actions for the players. The symbols on the game board helped but the downtime where to long.
- All those options sometime gave a nearly a analyse parlays situation (many options are both week and strong).

Other configurations:
- I printed the game board on 4 A4 pages (2x2) but this game board needed since you have at lest 3x3. I used to large markers and the game board did get overcrowded.

Hope this help.

// Johan

jwarrend
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Joined: 08/03/2008
June test session

Johan,

Thank you again for giving the game another look! A couple of questions about the game itself:

-- Did the players play the game to completion?

-- How long did the game last (time-wise)? How many turns?

-- What were the final scores? Were players able to assemble enough achievement tokens to record a few chronicles? Were they able to make enough progress to achieve reasonable chronicle scoring?

-- Did players complete cities? How many cities were there by game end?

-- Did the caravan come into play at all?

-- Was there much combat? Was the combat resolution quick or laborious?

On to your specific points:

Quote:
There where no rules that failed (when we had a situation and looked it up, the rules where there).

Good to hear, one always worries about rules loopholes! Did the reference cards help the players to follow the rules?

Quote:

- The action selection mechanism is the strongest part in the whole game (you can only the same action once in a turn and that action will exclude another action). I think that the mechanism is what does this game unique among civ. games and make the game interesting.

I'm glad that this mechanic appealed, it was, in the design process, the crucial discovery that will, I hope, enable the game to be played quickly (more to come on that). My main concern is that there are some actions that are more important than others (which may be ok) and that some actions, you just can't go for 2 turns without doing. But this remains to be seen. Some of the individual actions may need to be tinkered with.

Quote:

- You have always a choice on the actions (this is no game that play itself).

This is also good to hear. I worry, oppositely, that the game is either too easy or too difficult. I'm still not sure it's not the latter.

Quote:

Still the downtime between actions for the players. The symbols on the game board helped but the downtime where to long.

I'm still surprised by this, but I believe it because my experience was sort of the same when I last played with a new group. The actions themselves are really short -- did you at least find this to be the case? But because they were so quick, players were "surprised" when their turn came up, and needed to spend some time thinking about what to do.

So in your opinion, is the downtime caused more by players planning about what they want to do, or is it due to players having a hard time processing the information such as the state of the game board, etc?

Quote:

- All those options sometime gave a nearly a analyse parlays situation (many options are both week and strong).

I can understand this. Despite my best efforts to streamline the game, I've also tried to leave it very open and flexible to a variety of strategies. I believe that this could leave the new player with a feeling of directionlessness. So my design goals now are to try to ease that somewhat (with the quick start setups, for example), and to make sure that experienced players don't find the game to be directionless. (because if that happens, then truly the flexibility of the game is to no purpose)

Thank you and your friends very much for playing the game. Your session report is very helpful, and I'd be very interested to hear your reply on some of these points if you have time.

Again, many thanks!

Best,
Jeff

Johan
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June test session

Hi
I will try to answer you questions but I had 2 games going at the same time so I don’t know all the details. here is my answers...

jwarrend wrote:
Thank you again for giving the game another look! A couple of questions about the game itself:
-- Did the players play the game to completion?
-- How long did the game last (time-wise)? How many turns?

The game was not played to the end... They did play for more then 3 hours (I thing around 3.5 hours). But they had a clear winner (it was a little of a "Run away leader" situation in the end). I don’t know the number of turns.
One of the players was rely analytic and that made the game slower than it should have been.

Quote:
-- What were the final scores? Were players able to assemble enough achievement tokens to record a few chronicles? Were they able to make enough progress to achieve reasonable chronicle scoring?

I don’t know the final score, but yes to the other question. The reason that we had a so clear winner is that he was going for the chronicles and the other started to try to build civilizations without a goal.

Quote:
-- Did players complete cities? How many cities were there by game end? -- ----Did the caravan come into play at all?
-- Was there much combat? Was the combat resolution quick or laborious?

I don’t know (again sorry). But I know that they did go for the cities (building cities was the main target for the game). I don’t know how many areas that actually did get a city.
There were Very little battle at all (and the battle was quick and it always was militaries against civilians).
No caravans. I did not explain the caravans in the start of game and when they was coming into the game they wanted to live without them.

On to your specific points:

Quote:
Quote:
There where no rules that failed (when we had a situation and looked it up, the rules where there).

Good to hear, one always worries about rules loopholes! Did the reference cards help the players to follow the rules?
I still think that it would be good to have more examples in the rules (the rules are hard to read but all is there.

Quote:

So in your opinion, is the downtime caused more by players planning about what they want to do, or is it due to players having a hard time processing the information such as the state of the game board, etc?

Both. The players did there analyst when it was there turn as a result of the overview problem.

Sorry that I could not be more specific on your questions (I would like to be) but I was having two game sessions at the same time.

// Johan

Johan
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June test session

Art attack and Chicago

I ask Mike (Hamumu) and René (Zaiga) if I could bring there game and have them tested. The reason was that this is a light party game for night sessions and something to test between games (another reason is that I like those games).
Darebase was now used for that (that is a 2-player game made by Matt Warden
(Brykovian) a game that I can recommend when and if it hit the market)).
I have very little to add the previous tests that I have done on these games, but here they are:

Art Attack by Hamumu
Draw your monster and attack each other. Use your cards wisely.
Once again we had one player that wanted to win and he draw his monster in a way so arms could be wings, eyes could be mouth and ears could be horns. The other players did judge against him every time. The game ended up in a draw (all monster did lose there lives and there was no winner).
One thing: Instead of writing down the hit points, I used markers to show how many lives they had left. It worked much better than writing down the points and all players could see who had the stronger monster.

Chicago by Zaiga
Chicago is a Clue game where the player has to cooperate. Either will the players win or the game. That is the key to the game. That was also what went wrong in the test that we had. We only had one session and one player destroyed the whole game by wanting to win the game by himself (still I explained that they will win or lose together).

With this two final games I have now send reports to all designers that had games that were tested this weekend.

The next test session is July 2 but that session is already booked.

// Johan

jwarrend
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June test session

Johan wrote:
Hi
I will try to answer you questions but I had 2 games going at the same time so I don’t know all the details. here is my answers...

No problem, thanks for trying to provide answers. If you have contact info for any of the players and wouldn't mind putting me in touch with them (and if they wouldn't mind me getting in touch with them!), that would be great.

Quote:

The game was not played to the end... They did play for more then 3 hours (I thing around 3.5 hours). But they had a clear winner (it was a little of a "Run away leader" situation in the end). I don’t know the number of turns.
One of the players was rely analytic and that made the game slower than it should have been.

Ah, the slow player. It's sometimes unfortunate to have a slow player in a playtest, because it makes the results of the game hard to interpret. Did a playtest really drag, or did it just feel like it dragged because of a slow player? Is the game really long, or was it just long in this one playing? These can be tough questions to answer.

Quote:
I don’t know the final score, but yes to the other question. The reason that we had a so clear winner is that he was going for the chronicles and the other started to try to build civilizations without a goal.

That's interesting.

Quote:

I don’t know (again sorry). But I know that they did go for the cities (building cities was the main target for the game).

That's interesting; I think that cities are meant to be only perhaps 25% of your scoring, but I'm not sure if it works out that way in practice yet.

Quote:

There were Very little battle at all (and the battle was quick and it always was militaries against civilians).

This doesn't surprise me too much; I think that at present, there is just too much other stuff that you need to do to make militarism worthwhile. I suspect that it becomes more important later in the game as the territories fill up more and occupation of territories matters more for scoring. I also suspect that different groups will play more or less militaristic styles, and we'll have to play with a wide variety of players before getting a handle on the exact role that combat plays in the game.

Quote:

No caravans. I did not explain the caravans in the start of game and when they was coming into the game they wanted to live without them.

That's probably ok. I could definitely envision the caravan as being an "expansion" variant. At present, though, one of the scoring cards relates to how many "caravan" tokens you've accumulated, so if it is to be an expansion rule, I need to replace that card for the "basic" game.

Quote:

Both. The players did there analyst when it was there turn as a result of the overview problem.

Interesting. Did the non-slow players also have this problem?

I guess I'm still not sure yet how much of a problem this is, and as I've mentioned, since I know the game well it's not a problem for me. I'll have to watch how it goes next time we play. I can definitely see having trouble formulating a strategy, but I still don't completely understand the problem with visualization.

As I said, this is something I clearly need to continue to keep an eye on and try to understand more clearly. I really think that the problem may simply be that the game's various subsystems take perhaps as much as a half-game to a full game to internalize (maybe), and then actually getting to the point where you can make strategies takes another half-game to a full game. Maybe this is how it is. It may be possible to make things more obvious, but I have to more clearly understand what is the slow step in getting to a point where a player can make his moves quickly and intelligently.

Thanks again!

-Jeff

Johan
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June test session

Jeff. I'm sorry that I was not that much help this time.

I am planning to run another session (the final one) with the game now when we are familiar with the game. The test will be in the August session.

// Johan

Hamumu
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June test session

Johan wrote:

One thing: Instead of writing down the hit points, I used markers to show how many lives they had left. It worked much better than writing down the points and all players could see who had the stronger monster.

The markers are a nice way of doing it, but they cause the problem you had of having a tie! If you track by adding 'hits' upward, then the game ends when everybody (but one) has at least 25 hits, but some of them will have more. So even if everyone ends up above 25, one of them will be just barely above. Maybe the way to do it is to have a central board with life tracks for each player, that run from 25 down to -10 or so, to provide that added information.

I really want to get back into this game and others, but I'm so busy (just moved two days ago!) and really need to spend my time on the money-making side of my business, and unpacking. Too much to do, no time to do it...

zaiga
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June test session

Johan wrote:
Chicago by Zaiga
Chicago is a Clue game where the player has to cooperate. Either will the players win or the game. That is the key to the game. That was also what went wrong in the test that we had. We only had one session and one player destroyed the whole game by wanting to win the game by himself (still I explained that they will win or lose together).

Hey Johan, thanks for testing the game (again). I have already given up on the design. There are some nice ideas - I like the dice mechanic / action selection mechanic especially - but it just doesn't seem to work as a cooperative game. Any cooperative game can be destroyed by an obnoxious player, that's not the problem for this game in particular. Where "Chicago" fails, I think, is that it's not really obvious how players can actually cooperate. I think there are various ways of cooperating in "Chicago", but they are really subtle, and so only players who are familiar with the game system will effectively be able to cooperate. Players who can't see through these subtle layers of cooperation will just play in their own vacuum, which somewhat diminishes the whole point of a cooperative game.

Another thing that bugged me about the design was that record keeping was a bit fiddly. Players needed pen and paper to keep track of which suspects they had eliminated and other clues, and they needed a screen to hide this all behind. Of course, other deduction games such as Mystery of the Abbey, Clue and Sleuth have this as well, but I think I prefer games where you don't need to do any record keeping.

Perhaps I'll revisit this game one day. I'll probably keep the dice mechanic, make it a competitive game, and reduce the number of suspects to eliminate the record keeping. Thanks for testing the game though, your comments have been invaluable!

Johan
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June test session

zaiga wrote:
Perhaps I'll revisit this game one day. I'll probably keep the dice mechanic, make it a competitive game, and reduce the number of suspects to eliminate the record keeping. Thanks for testing the game though, your comments have been invaluable!

I am looking forward to see a new generation of the game. Still I have my version (laminated cards ;) ) and we will probably play it from time to time (It is a good introduction to Mystery of the abbey.

// Johan

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