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Viking Invasion Play Time Reduction

So previous to this, the average play time for my game, Viking Invasion (working title) in play tests has been 3 hours, and that is with a full, experienced crew of players. People who have helped me play test the same game multiple times before.

This game duration sort of bothered me. Personally I am fine with a game that takes that long; I come from a warhammer background, and I play games like Zombicide and Pandemic which consistently take myself and those in my game circle 2.5+ hours to play. But I was concerned with more casual gamers who would be less likely to want to invest more than 2 hours on a game, even one with vikings in it.

So the first thing I did was take 1/3 off the turn counter (8 turns instead of 12 to be played), and I reduced the number of points needed for a win by 1/3 also. Then I ran into a little interesting issue. The game has a resource curve that is not quite exponential, but is definitively more than linear. Those 4 missing turns were the 4 turns of the game with the highest resource production and consequently the easiest point scoring. So I needed to recurve resource production, which I did by adding a second silver (read: wild) resource generator at game setup, to compensate for the missing resource curve.

Then I realized also that the random spawn Vikings also had 4 less turns to harass the players, and the net result of this was that the players were under less pressure. The answer? Re structure the deck of cards that spawns Vikings. Now the deck has a higher ratio of viking spawn cards, without increasing the size of the deck itself. Now the Vikings spawn slightly more frequently, with slightly greater numbers. More pressure achieved.

So, made a few changes and now hopefully everything plays in under 2 hours. I will know for sure on Thursday, which is the next scheduled test play.

Mike

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