Disciples playtest session report

No, and that's actually a good idea! But...I don't think it will be necessary anymore, since we're (at least for now) going to do away with the "increment an action track" bit at the start of your turn. So now, the only thing that happens is you flip a Deed and (for now) if it's the same town that Jesus is in, an Event happens. Much simpler.

Yeah, this is my main lingering concern with the design as well. The die is a small change, but every little bit helps! Eliminating the Jews track would also help this, and your analysis on that was good. It's not a definite yet, but I think I'll at least try it out -- Mike and Tom are likely to be the guinea pigs for that next week!

I think, though, that given that Judas getting 30 points is "fair" in relation to the scoring potential of other players, then the issue as I see it isn't so much one of needing to scale up the other players as to adjust the *rates* at which people score points. The easier knob to turn to do this is to adjust the rate of advancement on the Pharisees track, and this could easily done by making it longer, or, as you suggest, the payouts more non-linear, etc.

But, the other way it could be handled is for players to refuse to do "Pharisees" deeds. As Mike notes, this still will be present to help the traitor score point, but less than he'd get if the track advances. I claim that to keep the traitor at bay requires the concious, deliberate action of all players. Yet, many of the Deeds with Pharisees consequences are ones you'll want, thus, can you pass them up for the good of the group as a whole? It's a cute psychology excercise, which I'm afraid I'll have to do away with if people won't play "my" way!

The bottom line is this: with only one or two exceptions (events), the rate of advancement of the Pharisees track is *completely* in the hands of the players, (and I have *never* seen Judas get the track all the way up completely on his own). Given that, how could anyone blame the game itself for the Pharisees track moving up too quickly?

Non-linear numbering might work, but 30 spaces wouldn't, (a) because that's just too long of a track and (b) because there are only 43 Deeds in the game, and of those maybe 10 move up the Pharisees. It could work to have the Deeds move the Pharisees track different amounts...but (a) still makes me want to refine the current system rather than deal with a 30 space track.

Currently, it's: ("C" = can't betray)

C C C C 3 6 9 12 15 18 22 26 30

I could change it to

C C C C 2 4 6 9 12 15 19 24 30

That's a much more dramatic acceleration at the end. I also think it might be just as easy to keep the original track but add one "C" space to the beginning. Or, there's always the option of playing with the distribution of Deed cards, though that's harder to deal with in a controlled way.

Me too! Thanks for the feedback...

But conversely, if it's too opaque the first time, you may not want to play again either. For better or for worse, gamers are very quick to declare games broken or flawed, which I incredibly arrogant; a designer poured his heart and soul into this thing for a year or two, then a company saw something in it that made them want to invest in, they took the time to develop it and sharpen it, spent the money to put it in print, and then you in one playing (or in some cases just from reading the rulebook) are going to call it broken? The nerve!

In all seriousness, I don't typically like "strategy hints" in rulebooks, but this may be a case of a necessary evil; just something like "watch out for Deeds that advance the Pharisees track; too many, and the Traitor will run away with the game!" or something.

So, I continue to think that the game is aesthetically what I want it to be, but if people can't (or won't) figure out how the game is "supposed" to work after a couple of plays, then my "art" obviously isn't communicating.

Bottom line, for now, is: keep testing!

-Jeff

You want to add another track to this game? Are you nuts?

Completely kidding, of course. This is a great idea. In the original game, there was a fixed payout for 1st and 2nd in Gospel tokens. This seemed to make acquiring Gospel tokens pointless for a player who was trailing by a lot, and I think your system very nicely tries to make sure that everyone gets some tokens.

But, the "fixed payout" was, in the original system, the main problem moreso than the "closeout". The reason is twofold. First, in Game A, let's say the player with the most tokens has 3 tokens. In Game B, the player with the most has 10. In both games, that player will get 10 pts (or whatever), but not only does it not reflect the game-to-game relative level of achievement, but more importantly, 10 points may be a much different percentage of your score from one game to the next; a short game will have relatively lower scores from Deeds and Goals, for example, so a fixed Gospel payout could make Gospels overly powerful sometimes. (and counterintuitively so in this case; you'd think that the longer the game went, the more material you'd have, and the *better* your Gospel should be)

The other concern I have with removing an intrinsic value from the tokens is that while it incentivizes making sure "everybody has some", it doesn't reward you for helping others along; in fact, it just rewards you for getting everyone at least 1 token, then making yourself king of the hill. The "average" system, while mathy, does reward you for helping someone else along, although it's only "the person right below you"; it would be nice if you had to be even more magnanimous, but haven't come up with a way yet.

Perhaps a variant of your system could be adopted whereby there were several tracks with several payout schedules, and perhaps the group traverses from one track to the next based on how many tokens the lowest player has; maybe, for example, it would go:

A: 0 3 6 9
B: 2 5 8 10
C: 4 7 9 11

So as you go from track A to C, the payout for 1st place increases, but the relative payout between first and last decreases. Not sure if I've explained this clearly.

Perhaps the Gospel payout schedule could even be connected to the Political tracks in some way. That might be too convoluted, though.

Anyway, cool idea, thanks! I think it's too much of a change to adopt for this next session, but let's definitely talk it over next week!

This isn't quite accurate; in the "averaging" system, you get the average of your tally and that of the player with the next lower tally. So if I have 10 and you have 6, in fact, I want you to get, say, 2 more tokens so that the average of our tallies is 9 instead of 8. (the only flaw is that I can just as well do this by getting myself 2 tokens, but anyway). If anything, I think your system may have this problem more dramatically, since once everyone has a token, there's no incentive for me to throw anyone else a token for the rest of the game. Or at least I think that's how it is...

Anyway, definitely plenty to talk about next week!

-Jeff

It’s interesting, sometimes a playtest session makes you feel like you’ve got a masterpiece, and other times you feel like you’re not even close. Our session last night, with Mike, Tom, and myself playing, made me feel a little too close to the former.

We played with 3 players, a first for the system. It held up ok; you have a lot more control over which Deeds you can do, but the overall pacing of the game was pretty successful. By removing the die roll at the turn start, we also reduced the amount of time that the actions tracks spent “pegged”, which was sort of good in that deeds were easier to perform, but sort of bad in that it was harder to call Jesus.

This session, though, was primarily characterized by Mike blowing the doors off of Tom and I. He ended with 49 points, to Tom’s 30 and my 25. It all started in the 2nd turn, when Mike performed 2 Deeds (which wasn’t hard because they were still cheap at that point); I was in the town, as was Jesus, giving Mike a big 6 points and a pretty good head start on the rest of us. Tom and I both made inroads, but we never really found a way to catch up to Mike, and by the end, he just pulled further away. In a sense, everything just seemed to click for him; he seemed to just keep pulling exactly the right action cards from the face-down deck, so he was able to do about a Deed per turn, a pace Tom and I couldn’t match. Moreover, it always seemed to work out that the town with the most Deeds, to which Jesus was traveling, Jesus would reach just as Mike’s turn hit, meaning that Mike would be the first to have the opportunity to go in and perform the available Deeds in that town. I think there were at least two occasions where he cleared a town out of 3 Deeds (between himself and having Jesus perform Deeds). I’m not sure whether it was a fluke, or poor play on the part of Tom and I collectively or what, but man, we got hammered.

All that said, I don’t think there’s too much I’ll change before next time. I’m looking more seriously at “Reveal a Deed” as a new turn action, but I’m afraid that this will burn through the Deeds too quickly; maybe it will have to come at some cost; two like symbols or something? This would help both to give players more options, and to “flood” the board with Deeds so as to redirect Jesus. That was frequently the concern, that it just wasn’t possible to rearrange the “town with the most Deeds” picture in such a way that Jesus wouldn’t move in a way beneficial to Mike. The old rules, where Jesus’ movement was optional helped this effect a lot, but the concern there was that Jesus *never* moved.

A few minor wrinkles here and there; for the 3 player game, I started each track (Pharisees and Rome) 1 space forward. Next time, I think I’ll move both up two spaces. Also, Mike had Thomas’ goal, which is “If you performed fewer Deeds than Jesus, get 1 VP for every 2 you performed; if you performed as many or more, get 1 VP per Deed”. This is way too easy in the 3 player game, Mike got 10 points from it. I like the “tipping point” of the goal, but in practice, I think it’s either too handsome or too weak depending on the game, but rarely "just about right". I may change the second half of the goal to “if you performed as many or more Deeds as Jesus, get 1VP per Deed *that Jesus performed*”. This incentivizes keeping your own tally high, but also making sure Jesus does a lot (probably paying out Gospels to others as well).

Other than that, no big changes are planned till we see how serious this “runaway leader” turns out to be. I’ve seen it before in less dramatic fashion, but it’s an open question as to whether there’s a good way to catch and overtake a leader who’s running away with the game. It will require some creative playing, I think, but perhaps it can be done. I really don’t want to have to add any more rules at this point, though it seems that scaling the payout of Deeds by the relative difficulty of performing them (maybe 1 pt per *card* that you pay to perform a Deed, on top of the regular scoring?), or else ramping up the late game scoring relative to the early scoring in some way, could be helpful. But all of this would require revaluing all of the goals, the Pharisees track, and the Gospel payout, the latter of which would be the most difficult. Bottom line, you don’t want early game fluctuations locking in the later course of the game. I don’t *think* the game suffers from this overall, but this session did to some extent.

Overall, a fun time, and kudos to Mike for an all time high score!

-Jeff

Another interesting Disciples session at our Fall Albany "Playfest". On hand were Steve, Dave, Mike, and myself. Dave was new to the game. The only change I made prior to this session was to reduce the Cost tracks in length, from 1-4 to 2-4.

Because it was a 4-player game, I decided to start the Pharisees and Rome track one space forward each. This game, we saw the Rome track scream up to 7 (out of 10) relatively early in the game. We also had “Deed overload”, which I attribute in part to having a Deed come out every turn now; there’s a steady trickle, and you just have to keep ahead of it. We didn’t, and the Pharisees track, as soon as it got out of the “Can’t Betray” spaces, was going to be attractive for the Traitor. I found this to be very satisfying since, from an early point, I had to be choosy about the Deeds I did and to reject the ones that would end the game too early. Dave, not having played, admitted afterward that he wasn’t thinking about this at all. He performed a couple of Deeds that advanced the Pharisees track to 9, and with 12 Deeds showing, Steve couldn’t resist the temptation any more, and ended the game by betraying, scoring 21 points. Mike had been sitting on 12 points up to then, but had done a good job targetting goals, and ended up with 19; I had 16, and Dave 12 or so. So, Steve did win, but it was close. We agreed that it was unnecessary to have started the Pharisees track one space forward, and will probably just start it at the normal starting point next time.

The interesting outcome of Steve’s betrayal was that he really didn’t want to do it -- not primarily because he didn’t want to win (although he did think it would be close, and it was), but because he was enjoying the game and didn’t want to end prematurely. In one sense, that's a good thing! But in another sense, this is one of the weaknesses of the game: that Judas’ betrayal doesn’t, I don’t think, always lead to a guaranteed win, but it does always end the game. If Judas thinks he can win early, he’ll betray, ending the game for everyone else. This is potentially a problem from the perspective of player experience (“we wanted to keep playing!”), but also for those who haven’t had time to make much progress on their goals. Not sure if it’s really a flaw or not.

There also appears to be a definite learning curve in the game associated with the Pharisees track, and specifically, being somewhat picky about Deeds that advance that track. What I think is interesting about the game is that a new player could potentially throw the game to Judas. Again, not sure how much of a “flaw” that is; it just seems to be the way the game works, and must be taken into account when evaluating whether one considers it good/bad/fun/whatever.

Mike gave me a quote that he got from someone else, which I think definitely applies to this game: “It takes 2 people to make a masterpiece; one to paint it, and one to shoot the other person at exactly the right time”. That’s not to say this game is a masterpiece by any means, so much as to say that I’m about ready to consider it done. I think it would be possible to tweak it forever and not have it improve significantly. So, I’ll probably plan to solo test one or two more times, maybe squeeze in one more live playtest, and then submit it. We’ll see how it goes!

-Jeff

I'm sure this is true, but on some level, I feel like disregarding consequences is in some sense a "rookie mistake"; your one goal, for example, paid out 4 points if you performed one deed in each category. That's a tough goal, and you need time to do it. Thus, doing something like advancing the Pharisees track, which hastens the game end, was probably not a good idea. I'm not at all picking on your game, just saying that there are some subtleties that I think take a few plays to fully appreciate.

I don't think I agree completely. I think the "best" state of affairs is when you can perform Deeds that both score plenty of points, and that dovetail well with your goals. But really, you ultimately have to strike a balance between these. For me, the key is trying to stay in the mix with the rest of the pack on normal scoring, but also having a lot of goal points at the game end. Mike obviously parlayed that strategy to great effect. A "pure Deed points" strategy will not be effective in the game, in my opinion and experience. You need to balance all three systems, or at least, I've never seen someone win who didn't .

I thought about raising the Deed payout to 2 VP for the Deed, 1 Vp if Jesus is in the town and 1 VP if others are in the town. This makes the base Deed payout proportionally more important, but because the winner is the one with the most points, I think that mathematically, it's perhaps a wash. Other schemes could be envisioned, but I think the bottom line is that "staying close to Jesus, and everyone else" is a strategy that the game rewards. I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing or not; there isn't anything that you give up to do that, and maybe there ought to be, to make "staying in less-populated towns" a more viable strategy. I'm just not sure how much to worry about it.

Yes, in a 5 player game, it's guaranteed. In a 4 player game, it's highly likely. Sorry to have not made that more explicit.

Yeah, it's great to have playtesters who aren't afraid to try new things! I like to do this in regular games, actually; I find it's a good way to learn how the game works and what it rewards.

Thanks again for your comments and kind words about the game!

-Jeff

One thing I was thinking about that could perhaps avoid the "clustering around Jesus" effect would be to revert to an original rule I had, whereby being in the same town as Jesus gives you a 1 symbol cost reduction, instead of an extra VP for performing the Deed. You'd still get a point for other players being in the town. It would still be optimal to perform Deeds in a town in which both Jesus AND other players are located, but now they have a separate effect.

I don't think I'll actually make this change, but it might be worth thinking about a little bit, at least. The thing that's nice about not having a Deed cost reduction (and the reason I abandoned it) is that it makes having Jesus perform Deeds more essential. But there would be benefits to having the cost reduction as well -- Deeds would get done faster, e.g. Not sure...

-J

I’m not 100% sure whether there needs to be a traitor in the 3 and 4 player games. What I do think is that the players have to think that there might be until very close to the end, even if there isn’t, or else a huge source of tension is removed.

There may be strategies such as performing Pharisees deeds to make people think that you’re the traitor, which would then make them cagey about perform Pharisees deeds while you could keep performing them. Of course, this would be a risky strategy given the possibility that there actually is a traitor!

I also think that a “guess the traitor” mechanic, were I to re-insert such a thing, would depend on some uncertainty in the 3 player game, at least, or else random guessing might be too powerful.

It's possible I may go to a deal that guarantees a traitor in every game.

One other note that may be of interest. I ran through a 3 player solo test today with one player as the Traitor, who I had aggressively pursue betrayal. It corroborated for me that the traitor appears to be a viable position in the 3p game. Curiously, at one point the traitor could betray and get 26 points, but his non-betrayal scoring was worth 30 VPs at that point. This was one of the great decision points that the traitor can face -- he has the power to end the game, but is it best to end the game and go for the win? You just don’t know how many points the other players are sitting on, so it’s an agonizing decision.

I chose to have him keep the game alive longer, and in the end, there wasn’t another opportune time to betray. Final scores were 34/33/31, with the traitor player in 2nd place.

One lingering “bug” is that many games seem to be ending with the exhaustion of the Deed deck rather than the end of the Rome track. I’m thinking that it might be necessary to either allow the game to continue to be played beyond the end of the Deed deck, or to shorten the Rome track by 1 space. Currently, it takes 9 positive advances on the Rome track to reach the end, and there are 11 Deeds that advance the track. An alternative would be to adjust the consequence when the Jews track pegs negative to be “advance the Rome track” rather than “move one Action track back one space”. But it would change that track a bit in feel. Currently the negative end is “good”, whereas in the other model, neither end would be “good”, and you’d instead seek to keep the Jews “ambivalent”.

Just some more thoughts and observations. This is more solo testing than I’ve done in a long time, but it’s been quite instructive.

Re: player size, currently it's 3-5. There's no reason 6 couldn't play, but I don't think it would work as well, and I probably wouldn't recommend a publisher printing it on the box; I'd advocate it more as a "chaotic variant", and one in which the Traitor will probably win most of the time. I don't really want to go to the effort of trying to balance the game for that big a group, since I don't think it would work that well anyway...

As for 2 players, I think it should work just fine, but again, the tension of the traitor track is pretty much removed.

And finally, re: Gheos, I say it as "JEE-os", although technically, you could even say "FEE-os"...

-J

Complacent, I guess. No, it’s not so bad. It’s just a question of whether it would then accelerate the Rome advancement too much. The game is currently a “metastable” thing that appears to be precariously balanced across all its systems, and I’m very paranoid that changing something like this will necessitate more additional playtesting to re-balance.

The key in its favor is that in most games, it seems that the Jews track will only peg to a given end once or twice, so that’s probably about what I’m looking for; it’s equivalent to shortening the track, but it also simplifies the rules regarding the Jews track, and I don’t need to cook up an icon for “reduce one track”. (originally, both ends of the Jews track advanced the Pharisees, but I’m fairly sure that’s too strong for the traitor).

Not sure I see the justification for it yet... 4 is already pretty expensive for Deeds; 5-cost Deeds would be prohibitive, and it’s not always possible to have Jesus perform a Deed (if he’s in the wrong town, e.g.) to get costs down.

On the other hand, it does have the advantage of giving a bit more variability on the tracks, but I don’t see another justification.

Not sure whether this is needed; I think you want this change so as to the 1st turn a little more varied, but really, I think it would just mean that your first card draw would be to the face-down pile, and the ones who were lucky enough to draw a 2-symbol card would get to do a Deed that turn. I don’t know whether it’s needed, but I’ll consider it.

What would be the motivation for this change?

First, as we’ve discussed, calling some of the events “ineffectual” is a matter of opinion. You are referring, of course, to the events that involve players voting to achieve some benefit (or avoid some punishment); I do like those because I find they help evoke the theme for me. Furthermore, I don’t think that they’re necessarily ineffectual across the board because (a) I have seen the events agreed upon in my playtests and (b) agreement will probably be more common in a non-hardcore gamer setting (like a family, e.g.), and I would expect that much of the game’s audience will be more casual players.

The idea of a static event flow, like the Event tracks in Lord of the Rings, is valid, but it seems to me like a parallel move. I think it makes the game more similar to LotR, which I think is undesirable.

I’m also not clear on what you think is wrong with the current system. I actually like the way that Events are triggered when a Deed is revealed in a town where Jesus is. Of course, doing away with this would be one less rule to remember, but I don’t see the impetus for the change other than that.

I have gone through quite a few iterations with the goals, and I’m actually fairly happy with the current set. I originally had some goals depending quite a bit more on what other players did than the current set does. The bottom line is that it’s hard to find a set of 12 different AND balanced goals in a game with as few mechanics as this one. I’d be happy to hear any suggestions for alternative goals than the ones I have.

No matter what, it seems inevitable that Gospels will be converted to VPs at the game end in some way. Having said that, I could envision perhaps a different payout schedule. Here’s one I came up with today:

Let’s say there are 4 players. So you lay out 4 cards, labeled “1st”, “2nd”, etc., corresponding to the rankings of tokens that each held. Then, tokens are allocated to these cards. First each player would give 1 Gospel token to the “1st” card. (forget ties for now...). Then, each player would give 1 token to the “2nd” card. Then the 3rd, then the 4th, and then the 1st again, and so on. Then, players would claim the tokens on the card corresponding to their rank and receive VPs in the amount on the card.

I played around with this a bit today, and it appears to smooth out the payouts more, making them more homogeneous. I’m not sure it’s a good system, but it might be a good mechanic for something...

Another possibility would be to use Gospel tokens as a currency with which to buy something, a la Sands of Time. Maybe you use them at the game end to “buy” the Deeds that Jesus performed, which then benefit you in some way... Or maybe you buy “power cards” that give you some upgrade of some sort or other. Maybe you can even cash them in for extra actions.. I think that any of these would be almost impossible to do without adding complexity to the game, and I don’t want to do that at this stage.

As you know, I’m also making a game about Acts, and one thing I’d like to do is to create a “campaign” game by which you could play the games in succession. So in that game, Gospels could take on some alternative meaning; maybe you use Gospels to buy something at the start of Acts.

I’m not sure what alternative function Gospels could take on here. The only change I could really see making is to alter the way that they pay out. I’ll see if I can come up with something clever.

As you can see, I’m experiencing an overall reluctance to change anything substantially at this point. Part of this is due to a lack of desire to go “back to the drawing board” and re-balance whole systems without a clear-cut motivation as to how a given change will improve the game. But also, the game just feels “done” to me; the 3 solo playtests I’ve run in the last couple of days have all gone really well, and I feel like things are clicking about the way I want them to. So I’m definitely not trying to ignore suggestions or criticisms, it’s just that at this point, I’m not really looking to try out changes that would make things different to see if they happen to make things better; I really only want to know if something is clearly deficient, and then address how to improve that.

Regardless, as you know, I’m very grateful for the excellent suggestions...

-Jeff