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Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

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Anonymous

My goal for this game was to create something simple to learn and fun to play, especially with large groups. (I guess that makes it a party game.)

Game rules

Game Board

Enjoy!

Hamumu
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

Very first thought: That's a LOT of components (just speaking of the plastic aliens, the rest is fine, but that sounds expensive to have 500 plastic critters).

Meaningless thought: the magic dice from the Buffy board game (what, like I'm the only one who has it?) would work well as plus/minus dice.

Party thought: definitely not a party game... more like light strategy in my book.

Just plain weird: Aliens give birth to a different kind of alien!? I don't have a problem with it, it's just an odd concept, obviously existing for gameplay purposes.

What I like:
I really like the 'scoring' mechanism - the rounds where each surviving player gets to keep moving, until it resets. Of course, I dislike that that means losing players spend a bunch of time not playing.
I also like, and think this is why you made the game, that it's a game about lots of little plastic guys, which I would constantly fiddle with throughout play.
I like the alternating goals, each turn being something random. Could end up too random though, testing is the key.

What I don't like:
The complexity! Players will need to consult charts to know which aliens do 2 of something to another alien, and which do 1, and they'll have to track how many aliens of each type each player has (for raids). There are effectively TWENTY actions the player can choose from per turn, and each one requires counting and adding and subtracting to see the merits of it. Granted, many of those twenty actions can be ignored, as they don't involve the alien type being battled over in the current round, but it still leaves many options, all of which require tracking a lot of numbers. I presume there's a good reason why some alien types do 2s of things and some do 1 (and it's not just randomly picked!)... but if you could make them just all do 1 all the time, or all 2 for some actions, then you'd remove the whole chart issue, other than to specify which aliens affect which. Still, this entire mechanism is a difficult one. It should be interesting to see what happens in playtests. I think there's a bit much for the player to think about here, not in a deep strategic way, just in a lots of different numbers to keep in mind way. I think you're looking for something to have really quick turns (especially since players routinely get booted out of the game for several rounds in a row), and this doesn't look like it would yield that to me.
I also don't like the name Ring Riders, especially in comparison to the planety names everyone else has. Why not Plutonians or something? That's just me.

What I dislike enough to toss:
There doesn't seem to be a lot of reason for Order Cards. Just added complexity. Why not have a 'dealer' who is the guy who grabs aliens from the box and hands them out when people roll (which is important, lots of time will be spent doling out those guys I fear), and play proceeds clockwise starting from his left. Then after each round, whoever won the round becomes the dealer, relegating them to playing last in the next round (or make them be first - whichever is more disadvantageous). This is very simple and takes a clunky step out of the game.

Proofreading thoughts:
This sentence is jacked in 2 places: "An Order Card may be seen by the player who received it be must be kept secret until they time when it must be revealed."
"If the plus-and-minus die rolls a plus, then the highest-rolling colored die determines which kind of alien the players must strive to have many." It should be "have many of", though that's a dangling participle itself. Actually I think this whole concept can be explained more simply, although I just tried and didn't come up with anything good. It makes sense in the instructions, though.
"If a player’s maker " in The Round Ends, should be marker. In general, the explanation under The Round Ends is understandable, but hard to read, it's not written clearly.
Not exactly proofreading, but it seems weird that purple is missing a space in the long game, on the board.

Random Idea:
You could skip the +- die and just roll the alien dice until you get one or more 1s or 6s, then reroll the 1s and 6s until you have just one 1 or 6. If it's a 1, you want few of those, if it's a 6, you want many of those.

Anonymous
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

I was unable to load the websites for the rules and board. do you have smewhere else you can also post them?

jwarrend
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Joined: 08/03/2008
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

Thanks for sharing your game with us. It sounds like you have some ideas that would make for a fun game. However...

The complexity associated with the relationships between different aliens is just too much for the simplicity of the game. I think you first of all must go to simple Rock-Paper-Scissors style interactions, and cut the “2 for 1” relationships out altogether. Second, I’d probably try to reduce the number of kinds of actions from 4 to 2 or 3. Finally, I’d try to find a way to create a graphical representation of the relationships so that they don’t have to be memorized. Just a sketch that says “Breed” and then something like “Venusians -> Ring riders -> Martians etc”.

For me, the rule that coming in last in a round forces you to sit out would probably keep me from ever wanting to play the game. It’s a terrible rule. I think that just being prevented from advancing is perfectly ample punishment. Also, I wonder if there are other interesting ways to use the board; maybe the space you’re on could determine which aliens you are allowed to act upon. This could be a nice way to restrict the possible actions in the action phase, to reduce analysis issues.

There’s a pretty big amount of luck from the die rolling, but it seems appropriate to the overall lightness of the game. I just think you need to work to reduce some of the learning curve so that the game is more accessible.

Good luck!

-Jeff

nosissies
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Joined: 07/26/2008
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

to echo DrMayhem, is there someplace else where we can get a look at your rules/board? It seems your provider is limiting your ability to get comments on your game.

looking forward to seeing your game

peace,
Tom

edit --
hey, I finally got the files, I'll put my comments up later tonight.

Anonymous
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

I have read through your rules and echo some of the comments by other folks here. That's a lot of pieces! I can sympathize, as my game (posted last week) had a large number of components, too. Sometimes, bits are just too fun to play with! :-)

Anyway, here are a couple ideas for you.

You have four distinct actions. For these actions, different species have a 2:1 or 1:2 ratio, yet each action is different. That's a lot to remember, and would probably be my first cause for throwing in the towel on this game.

You might be able to smooth this out in one of two ways. One could be a simple "size" attribute (small, medium, large). For the consume action, if the species you select to do the consuming is larger, they can consume at a 2:1 rate. If smaller, it takes more to consume one, so a 1:2 rate. For produce, it could still sortof work this way. Maybe smaller species have litters where larger ones have single offspring. Assimilate and Raid could work the same way as consume.

The second way to smooth this out is by defining strengths and weaknesses for each of the species. If you were stronger at consumption, you're using the 2:1 rate. If it's your weakness, maybe it doubles the opponent's rate (so 1:1 -> 2:1, and 2:1 -> 4:1). You can set up the strengths and weaknesses to offset each other. If each species has one of each, that could be a decent balancing mechanism. You may find some species that tend (based on these strengths and weaknesses) to lose a lot of their number quickly. That's the one to select "Produce" as a strength. Just like nature! :-)

On the component side, you could have markers that represent 5 or 10 of a particular species. That would help to reduce the sheer numbers required.

On the game board, instead of having two "end" spaces, you should have the short game start further along the track than the long one, or make a circular (orbital?) track on which you do one or two laps, depending on desired game length.

The dice rolling sounds a little contrived. Take a look at the eight-sided die that comes in Roller Coaster Tycoon (it has colored sides). Maybe adapt a 4-sided die for this game if you went with 4 species, or a six-sided die for 6 species, with a color on each side. If you keep the 5 species, you could have a 6-sided die and a "wild" side, where each player can choose whichever color they want.

On the turn order, what if you had a few more cards than the number of players, and as people take actions, they have to trade in their card for one of the extra ones. That would shake up turn order without the need to deal cards out, and gives the player a (somewhat) meaningful choice to make, rather than relying on luck.

Finally, your rules could use a bit of proofreading once you get to a stable ruleset. My own pet peeve (well, one of many) is Lose versus Loose. The first is the opposite of win, and the second is the opposite of tight (and can also be used like release or unleash).

I hope you find this useful. :-)

nosissies
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Joined: 07/26/2008
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

Here are my comments ... finally..

At a high level, I love the concept. If I were to walk into a room where there were a dozen people sitting on the floor in a circle frantically trading/swapping/exchanging/throwing aliens around, I would be very intrigued

… however, I’m not convinced that this is quite what the game would look like.

It's not a bad little logic/planning game, but I'm not sure it fits the bill as a party game.

As party games go, this one seems to have too many actions/options it's a lot to keep track of. I don’t think it would hold a group very well as it is a relatively individual game with little interaction, non-simultaneous play also may slow it down significantly especially if folks are essentially trying to come up with a transfer function to get from what they have to what they want. Sure there is some intereaction allowed with the RAID actions, but I think people may be rather bogged down in coming up with the transfer function ... oh and just as an excercise I translated all the alien names to letters just to see what all the action options are, it ends up looking like this .... (where stuff on the left hand side of the "arrow" is what you have in your hand before the action and the right hand side is post-action, excepting the case of the RAID of course.

CONSUME:
A,B -> A
C,D,D -> C
B,E -> B
D,D,A -> D,D
E,C -> E

PRODUCE
A -> A,C,C
C -> C,B
B,B -> B,B,D
D -> D,E
E -> E,A

ASSIMILATE
A,A,D -> A,A,A
C,E -> C,C
B,A,A -> B,B,B
D,C -> D,D
E,E,B -> E,E,E

RAID ()indicates they belong to your neighbor
A,(E) -> A,E
B,(C) -> B,C
C,C,(A) -> C,C,A
D,(B,B) -> D,B,B
E,(D,D) -> E,D,D

that's a lot to keep track of, and I'm not sure there is a simple visual way to make these easier to remember (ie color/size).

and a few other points ...

-I wonder if thre is a "rich get richer" problem here as the player who succeeds in a given round will have moved ahead n spaces (n = number of players) while the person who failed in the first turn will have moved zero. For a party game you don't really want people sitting out too much, unless the game is really intense, in which case getting out of the game should be the goal (ie get out so you can rest)

-I'm not sure the high/low die is neccesary, could the leader decide?

-Must there always be only one goal (most of alien x) why couldn't there be multiple goals in the case of a tie?

In general, I think there are a lot of good ideas here, but I'm not sure they all belong together and/or in a party game. For example, I like the redistribution of order cards, but I don't think it really adds anything to this game.

Any chance you've done any playtesting of this yet? Did you manage to scrounge up 500 aliens?

Good luck with your game!

peace,
Tom

Deviant
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Joined: 12/31/1969
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

It seems like theicemage and others have beaten me to the punch here. This is an intriguing exchange game that suffers from it's own complexity. The only thing is, I don't think the mathematical operations here are really very complicated. All this game lacks is a simple algorithm to keep track of all those relationships!

Discard the numbers for now. Let's say each race is "bad at" one thing, "average" at two others, and "really good" at the remaining action. If an alien that is "really good" at producing tries to produce another that is worse at producing (average or bad at), it produces at a 1:2 ratio. If it produces an alien equal to itself (both are really good, bad, or average), it produces at a 1:1 ratio. Finally, if an alien produces another that is better than itself (if bad, then good or average producers are better), then it produces at a 2:1 ratio. Ditto for all other abilities. This is much easier to think about and the numbers are still "there", they're just submerged into the gameplay. Just like how you could analyze tennis as a game of trajectories, or you could just play the darn game!

My last concern is with the number of aliens and abilities. I just don't see how they could balance so that each alien is different yet equal. 3 actions that each defeat, are defeated by, or tie with one other action makes sense, and is exactly how Rock, Paper, Scissors works. If you added a fourth action (Tiger Claw, anyone?) then the game just wouldn't work. One or more actions would have to be better than all others. 5 is another good number (Rock, Paper, Scissors, Spock, Lizard), but only with an odd number of results. You've got some 5:4 alien/ability mechanic going on that I can't quite get my head around.

That's about it. Sorry if I got too technical. It's good to be able to finally read the rules!

Johan
Johan's picture
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Joined: 10/05/2008
Game #58: Mission from Planet X by Clarissimus

Hello

Thanks for sharing. When I understood the game (sometimes I'm a little bit slow), I saw the potential. The base is good and is not too complicated.
Some issues:

Out of game
If someone loose all his/hers aliens, then he will win the turn 50% of the times (and loose 50%). I suggest that each player get 1 alien of each type in the beginning of each turn (you should always start with aliens).

500 Aliens!!!
Actually you need 40 aliens for 8 players (one of each alien to each player).
Each player gets a marker board, where they can keep track of the number of aliens (Now you never run out of aliens).
As I can see it, the aliens are just resources and not used as anything else.

Ratio
Simplify the ratio. The current ratio makes the game more complex then it is.

The +/- Dice
Why do you not use both the high and the low dice at the same time (and remove the +/- dice) with the following set?
- The first player that is out is the one that has the lowest difference between the alien types.
- The second is the one with fewest of the high score.
- The third is the one with most of the low score.

Alien dice
I think that this game would benefit from special dice. I would make a D6 White (+ dice) and a D6 Black (- dice). Each side of the dice has one alien type (you have to add an alien but that is only 8 more alien markers).
If both dice show the same alien, then you should still have and not have that type (be in the middle)

Table
If you want to make the game a little more complicated (expand the ratio), then here is a proposition:
- Make a 2-Dimentional table that shows alien action against alien (row/column). Each cell is around 1"x1". This table is printed on the players Marker board (each player has one).
- Now make markers (1"x 1"). Each marker shows an action and a ratio. It can also show a protection or special ability.
- When a player looses a turn, he draws a marker and places it anywhere on the Table. The player can not place the marker on a cell that already has a marker.
The strategy will change during the game.

Good luck with the game.

// Johan

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