Last weekend, I ran several more playtests of Clash of Empires.

Below are some notes from the playtest.

• Players often got frustrated because they were stuck with a hand of useless cards that were difficult to get rid of.
• Players did not enjoy the deckbuilding part of the game and felt it wasn’t very useful.
• Players liked how the game was quick with relatively simple rules.
• In summary, people mostly enjoyed the area control portion of the game, but did not like the deckbuilding portion of the game.

Over the next month, I will focus on finding ways to improve the deckbuilding part of the game. Here are several ideas I am considering.

Instead of requiring a specific card to take an action, have cards give bonuses to an action.

For example, players would be able to attack without having an “Attack” action card, but having the card would give a bonus to attack. This would help reduce frustration with not having a desired card while rewarding players for building strong decks.

Remove the deckbuilding portion of the game, and give players a fixed deck.

With the current game rules, building an useful deck that doesn’t prevent you from taking an action is possible, but it is not easy.  Having a fixed deck means it is easier to ensure that players can consistently do things on their turn, and not accidentally back themselves into a corner by buying the wrong combination of cards.

Additionally, a fixed deck would simplify the rules of the game and make it much easier to teach, and will not detract too much from the game.  The core idea of Clash of Empires is being able to strategically influence a board while having a quick combat system that strikes a balance between luck and skill.

Also, development of the game would be much simpler due to the need to have fewer cards. This would leave me more time to gather feedback and design expansions.

Have hexagonal tiles instead of a Europe map.

This would make designing the map easier as all I need to do is print out hexagons and put them together. Also, hexes will be useful in the long term.  In order to add more strategy and address concerns about replay value, I am planning to add rules for different terrain types and randomly generated maps, which will go well with hexagonal tiles. However, many players think a map of Europe looks better and offers more interesting gameplay due to its asymmetric nature.