Today, I ran another playtest at a Break My Game Event. I was primarily focused on seeing if players liked the mechanics, and making sure there were no broken strategies.
One of my goals is to make sure that strategies that ignore certain action cards are not successful. To do this, I ran 3 playtests with the following strategies.
- Game 1: Focus on influence and playing with the low-level combat cards in my hand:
- I did well early in the game, but I started losing in the late game because my opponent had stronger combat cards.
- Game 2: Gain some influence on the board, then trash most influence cards, and then focus on attacking:
- This did not work well because my opponent started placing influence in critical territories to boost his attack and defense power. I was unable to counter this because of my limited ability to gain influence.
- Game 3: Trash my attack cards to focus on influence early game, and transition into a strategy of using a 4 card deck.
- The early game did not go well for me. My opponent was allowed to be more aggressive with his influence plays because he did not have the threat of me attacking him.
- I lost further ground in the mid-game because I focused on trashing cards from my deck.
- The late game went better for me because my opponent did not take free actions to trash cards from his deck after losing a territory.
Feedback
- One player felt that the game ended before he could have fun fighting, which was also a complaint last time.
- Being forced to gain a militia into your discard pile was annoying. to some people.
- The theme of the game was weak.
- Territory rules do not make sense, but they make the game interesting once a player understands them.
- The updated 100+ territory map is too big for 2 players.
- Players liked that the game was quick.
- People liked how the game was easy to learn.
- The mind games from playing hidden combat cards was interesting.
Things to work on
- Create rules for updated map that allow for quick 2-6 player games.
- Improve theme of game.