Hi all,
I thought it might be cool to have a forum for playtesting reports, and it seems that the admins have created one -- or maybe it was here all along and I never noticed it? Weird!
Anyway, we had a playtest session for the "Civilization building" game I've been talking about for some time. This was the fifth overall session we've seen, and though we've had different players every time, this session was played with most of the "core group" of playtesters who've been in or associated with the project all along.
The game seems to be sort of long -- it's never clocked in at under 4 hours, despite my strong belief that it can be played in 3. As we all know, a game that can be played in X minutes will take at least 1.5 X minutes to playtest, so that's probably part of it.
We've had most of our sessions at the local Thursday night game night at a store, and the result has been we've had to abort many games just before the last turn. This session was held on a Sunday, with an open ended time slot, so we finally played the game to completion. It was very good that we did!
To give an overview, the game features many of the elements common to civ building games -- building structures and cities, advancing your culture, fighting wars, producing resources, trading, etc. There are a few twists, but I think these can be best understood by articulating what I see as the "shortcomings" of other comparable games. The 4 that come to mind are Vinci, History of the World, Mare Nostrum, Civilization, great games all.
Vinci is very abstract, and relies solely on territorial conquest as a victory condition. History of the World involves too much luck in combat, is too long, and relies solely on territorial conquest. Mare Nostrum (though I haven't played) and Civilization both have a system where "resource production" translates directly into "progress" -- ie, when you can cash in a "set" of resources, that corresponds to giving you access to [this cultural advance]. And all of these games have a map board that is a plan-view of the Med.
So, my game seeks to fix all of these "shortcomings". I won't supply the details here, but am happy to go into more detail offline for anyone who's interested, and could even send you a rulebook.
This game had 3 players who had played the last iteration and 2 who hadn't played in a few iterations. We quickly found that there was a "learning curve" in the new rules, as after the first scoring round, the 3 experienced players, who had built cities early on, were at 8/8/7 compared to the other two players at 2/0 in Victory Points. This gave us some concern that "city building" was too powerful a strategy.
But the real shocker was in the end game. Because the game ends after a fixed number of turns (and it has to, because the turns are long), we found players doing "weird" things to max out their VPs. Players converted their production territories to cities for big points, since there was no longer a need to produce. Players vacated whole territories in hopes of setting up big combats that would gain them key territories or key military victories.
This endgame "cashing in the chips" effect was a big problem (in part because it introduces a turn order effect, in part because it's so athematic), and we're still working out ways to fix it. I think there are two predominant approaches -- make the endgame cashout undesirable, or make it difficult. As examples of the former, we've talked about possibly adding an endgame production round and have that be a VP category. So, to abandon your production base will cost VP. I don't like this because each player is producing enough resources that it will be sort of hard to track in a way that makes for useful decisions. We could also go to a "supply" effect where you need to have enough resources to supply your cities, eg, but that's very derivative of La Citta. As an example of the latter, we've considered changes to what is necessary for you to be able to build a city -- maybe you can only build one per turn, eg. In the end, I think we'll go to a combo of the two -- some VP categories will be made more difficult to achieve, and some will become interwoven in such a way that advancing yourself in one advances everyone else in the other.
My game has 4 VP categories, and what's been difficult is to make them all separate and yet interrelated. You don't want any 2 to become inherently connected, because then a "best" strategy can emerge. But you also don't want them to be too far divorced, or else it won't be possible to develop a strategy in the first place -- you'll just have to pick one of the four and go for it. So that has been the interesting thing about the game -- the mechanics have been easier to develop than the goals! We're still iterating over what the "best" set of VP categories ought to be, and I'm not sure we're there yet, but they've been changed a lot and are getting closer.
I'm also finding that while I really thought the game was getting close to "done", there really is still room for making pretty sweeping changes. I think this is good in a way, because sweeping changes are easily identifiable as "good" or "bad". Subtle changes and "tweaking" are more difficult to evaluate, particularly because you can't always be sure how a change in this will produce a change in that.
So, the key things I learned from this session were that in a long game, actually playing and testing the end game is absolutely crucial, as it reveals things about the game as a whole that the mechanics themselves won't reveal. What was kind of cool was that the final scores were 15/13/12/11/3, with the player who had started with 2 points ending up with 11. I was pleased with this, because it suggested that it's definitely possible to come back and get right back into the game. We did find that it's a little too hard to take down the leader, primarily because too many combats resulted in ties, but also, because it's just easier to hit a weak player as to hit a strong one. The key play balance issue, then, will be to remove the effect whereby a player can be "effectively" eliminated from an early stage, and have to sit and watch the rich get richer. I think that the changes I'll be making will mitigate this somewhat.
With the holiday season coming up, I'm not sure I'll get to playtest this one again before the new year, but I'm very pleased that with the 5 sessions we've had now, the game has improved dramatically, and it feels a whole lot more coherent -- this was the main observation of the guys who haven't played since an early stage -- that the game really "gels" a whole lot more, that it feels tighter and more "finished". I'm a bit surprised that we've kept as much of the initial game as we have, but what I think it reflects is that the game has always been built upon a few core principles and mechanics, and we've retained those while modifying everything that was obstructuing those "good" principles and replacing it with things that do a better job of evoking the atmosphere the game tries to create. In the early stages, it felt like things flowed too easily, but now it's really starting to feel brutal -- that I really must choose whether to do "this" or "that".
My residual concerns, then, are simply the game length, which is too long, the combat system, which is close to done but still needs tinkering, the end game, which is decidely ahistorical, and the appropriate set of VP categories, which is converging but not yet perfect.
So, there's my pretty long session report. I realize I didn't actually describe "John did this, then Chuck did that" kind of analysis, but since you don't know how the game works, it seems like that wouldn't have made as much sense. For what it's worth, we did find that different kinds of empires were possible. Andrew built an empire of small cities, giving him good flexibility. Chris had a sprawling empire that could strike far and wide. Matt and I had cultural centers, and Tony had an isolated but resource-rich corner of the board. That was really what I wanted for the game -- to be able to pursue different strategies but to have a means by which to compare them. I should observe that the game doesn't (yet) have a "historical" setup. It isn't that one player is Egypt, one is Rome, one is Babylon, etc. But what I think the game does offer is the flexibility to try to pursue a strategy like that of Rome, or of Egypt, or the Mongolian horde, etc. And I'll probably create a "fair" historical setup somewhere down the road, just for fun...
Anyway, hope you enjoyed my (pretty long) report!
-Jeff
Thanks. I've basically stopped all progress on all games except this one, in the interest of really getting it finished. Which is kind of ironic since it's the longest, most involved game I've designed (making it more of a pain to playtest), and it requires the most components (making it more expensive, and therefore less likely, to publish/self-publish). But, I don't worry about that stuff nearly enough, I guess -- I'm just trying to design a good Civ lite game, which I think would be a genuinely nice thing to have...
I wanted the game to be 2 hours, but that is turning out to be absurd. So, my new goal is that for 5 experienced players who are committed to trying to play quickly, the game should be playable in about 3 hours.
There is almost no downtime at all, because the turns are broken up into phases. This is good and bad. In a 3.5 hour game, it's sometimes nice to have a ten minute stretch where you can walk away and take a bathroom break, etc. But I think having less downtime is probably better than more, so that's how we're doing it.
Unfortunately, having a lot of phases also creates a lot of points for players to make decisions, and so "perfect planners" can really bog the game down. That's why I think the "3 hour" time necessarily reflects an experienced group of committed players -- there are some things that are worth thinking long and hard about, but sometimes heads-up play and making decisions in advance can speed those decisions up.
Thanks. I'm pleased to be finding that it is indeed fun to play. I think as we learn the game better, we'll get to the point where we can start trying out different strategies. Despite being a fairly simple game system, there does seem to be enough depth to allow for strategic planning, although the resources are tight enough that to get those great cultural advances, you really need to plan ahead for them!
I considered workshopping it, but I think it's a little too long for that. It's actually not all that complex -- the systems fit together pretty straightforwardly. But, since I'm in pretty heavy playtesting right now anyway, I don't really think it would be appropriate to workshop it at this point, as the feedback I need is more about play balance than about "brainstorming". Although, I definitely need rulebook help, so maybe I should workshop the game after all...
Anyway, looking forward to hearing about others' playtesting exploits as well!
-Jeff