After the latest Clash of Empires playtest in July, I decided to experiment with some major changes. It did not scale well because adding more players would end up making the game take too long, and there were balance issues with odd numbers of players.
In January 2015, I came up with a variant that made two major changes.

The first change was that players would secretly invest in certain factions on the board, and would earn points at the end of the game based on the success of those factions.  Many multiplayer area control games suffer from excessive leader bashing or targeting a specific player based on factors outside the game. With secret investments, it is harder to figure out the leader or target a specific player. Additionally, things would be faster because players will not be able to slow the game down by trying to calculate points.

The second change  was that each player made simultaneously took their turn. Players would secretly play cards from their hand representing a territory, and a specific faction that would get a unit there. This meant that I could easily add more players without making the game take significantly longer.  I playtested this variant, and it seemed to go well. However, I decided not to implement the variant because it was too much of a change.

Due  to the issues I had during the July playtest, I decided that some radical changes were needed. As a result, I revisited the variant I had made 18 months earlier and decided to try testing them again.

In addition to the rule changes, I decided to make a map of the US. Territory names were important, and I wanted to have ones that people would recognize.

Additionally, I decided to make the theme revolve around fast food corporations.  Many players did not like the old historic theme, and I felt fast food was a theme more people would like.

The playtesters liked the secret scoring mechanics, and the short playtime was also appealing to them.  For the next playtest, I’m going to continue working on this variant, and focus on the following gameplay changes.

• Add special action cards: Players said they wanted more ways of influencing the game state aside from placing units on the board. To address this, I plan to add special action cards that give various bonuses such as reducing a company’s endgame score.

• Fewer territories: Players have cards in the hand that refer to specific territories. This was an issue because the map had over 50 territories, and finding some of them took time. Companies would score multiple times throughout the game, and having a large number of regions made scoring tedious. To fix this, the number of territories on the updated map will be significantly reduced.

• Rework combat: Combat occurred every turn because a players turn usually involved playing a company’s unit in a rival territory. Resolving combat took time and significantly slowed down the game.. Additionally, combat was based on a die roll, which left players frustrated when a bad roll made their turn meaningless. In the future, multiple companies can have units in the same  territory, and combat will be triggered by special cards that will only show up every few turns. Players will also have more control over combat results.

On Sunday, I ran two more playtests for Clash of Empires with the following rules. The reaction was mixed, with players enjoying the area control aspect of the game but not the card mechanics.

Here is some of the feedback I received.

• It was frustrating to have a hand of weak cards that were difficult to get rid of.
• The area control element of the game was fun, but the card play felt boring and not well integrated.
• Some of the cards were confusing.
• The theme needs improvement.

For the new playtest, I will focus on improving the theme and making sure the card play is integrated well with the area control part of the game.

This week, I worked on an updated map. The goals were to make the differences between regions more clear and add naval territories to the map.

During the next week, I will focus on making the map easier to read and add some theming to the map.

This Sunday, I ran a playtest of Clash of Empires with a generic hexagonal map instead of the Europe map. In addition, I tested out the following changes.

• Special terrain types.
• When you take an opponent’s territory, you may move nearby influence into it.
• Players are no longer required to have specific cards to do certain actions, but will have cards that give bonuses for actions.
• Players will have a fixed deck of combat and action bonus cards.

Overall, the changes made the game simpler, but there were some issues.

Hex Map was boring

Players found the hex map to be dull due to a lack of theme or asymmetry. As a result, I plan to give up the idea of developing a hex map, and go back to the Europe map.

Attacking was too powerful

The ability to use influence to boost attack combined with the ability to move it into conquered territory made attacking too powerful. Placing extra influence in a territory was initially a way to make the “influence” action card useful in the late game, but extra influence have been the source of many balance issues over the past few months. As a result, I plan to remove the ability to advance influence into a conquered territory and make it harder to place influence into a conquered region

Combat was imbalanced

Players felt that the combat was not very interesting because of a lack of variety with the cards made the combat too predictable and dependent on rapidly cycling through the deck to get the powerful combat cards.

I will continue having fixed player decks, but they will get a massive overhaul in order to make combat more interesting. Additionally, some cards will get special abilities to address concerns about a lack of variety with the card types.

I am considering switching to the use of individual hexagonal tiles with different terrain types. This will be a good way to offer replay value by allowing the easy creation of different maps, and will be easier to balance than a map of Europe.

Here are the different terrain types and their effects.

• Mountains:  Players cannot place units on mountains, and supply cannot be traced through them.
• Hills: Owner gets +1 defense, and +1 attack when attacking adjacent regions.
• City: Worth 2 VP instead of 1 if controlled at the end of the game.
• Water: +2 defense when being attacked from a land territory. Additionally, when doing a move or attack action any two land territories connected by a continuous path of friendly land territories is considered adjacent. However, water tiles do not give victory points at the end of a game.

  Players will have the option of playing on a symmetrical map, or playing on a randomly generated map.

There will be several balance changes.

• Players will have the option of taking a move action.
• When attacking another territory, any additional cubes that participated in the attack must move to that territory if the attack is successful. Also, players must declare how many cubes they are using in the attack before combat is resolved.

  On the negative side, these terrain rules do add complexity to the game and increase the learning curve. As a result, they will be only added in an expansion, or if I find a way to simplify the base game.

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.

I am considering the idea of creating an agent-based real-time strategy game.

The idea behind the game would be that each player will have a bunch of uncontrollable agents that will do thing such as fight and gather resources. However, players would be able to make high level decisions to guide the agents in a manner similar to how a president leads a country. There are several things I like about creating a game like this

• Players will only focus on high level decisions, which will make learning how to play easy. At the same time,  these decisions will not always be straightforward, which will make the game appealing to experienced players.
• Watching the agents interact will be interesting, even for people who are not playing the game.
• There are lots of possibilities for developers who want to extend the game and do things such as create custom agents, or implementing better AI for the agents.

I made several visual changes to the map in order to address comments that it was difficult to read.

• Thicker borders.
• Larger territory labels.
• Arrows to represent connections over water
• Thick green borders to visualize sections of the map, which are blocked off based on the number of players.

Today, I ran another playtest at a Break My Game event.  The goal was to experiment with modified rules , and different player configurations besides the normal 1v1 format.

Here are several of the things I tried.

Modified supply rules:

I decided to try something different from using Go  rules to determine if unit should be removed from the game. Instead,  I changed the rules so that any unit that could not trace a path through friendly or neutral territory to a player’s capital was removed from the game. Players found these supply rules to be more intuitive,  and it led to more decisive attacks as it was easier to remove large chunks of territory from an opponent. However, I am not sure if I want to use the modified supply rules since it makes it too easy for players to surround and maintain control of large swaths of territory.

Team Rules(2 v 2):

For this playtest, I played with 3 other people, and we organized into teams of 2 with more available regions. The playtest went well because it maintained the things that made players enjoy the 1 v 1 game while the larger map and coordination with your teammate made the game interesting.

Free-for-all(3 players):

This did not go well because players were forced to play passively. An important part of this game is being aggressive to attack your opponent to reduce their influence. However,  attacking one person was discouraged because it left the player open to being attacked by the third person. Another important part of the game is not wasting turns, and that player would gain a major advantage if the rules allowed them to take one or two free turns. Players may also form alliances, which means a free-for-all version of this game would devolve into a series of 2 v 1 situations where the player being attacked by two people has essentially lost.
As a result, I’m going to ignore free-for-all-games for now to focus on 1 v 1 and team games.

Other comments

• Balance
  • Recruit cards were not useful at the game end.
  • Some players felt that there were issues with lame duck players and runaway leaders.
  • Map has too many choke points and needs to be opened.
• Ease of learning
  • Rules for extra troops on a territory was confusing.
  • Some players were confused about the rules, which made it hard to enjoy the game.
  • The map is confusing and needs a visual redesign.
  • Some of the territory borders were hard to read.

Things to change

• Rules clarity:
  • Create player aids.
  • Rewrite the rules so they are easier to understand.
• Game board design:
  • Make the map bigger.  There were many complaints about the map because it was too small.
  • Make sure the territory borders are clear.
  • Often, parts of the map will not be used, so have a clear way of covering them up.
  • Some parts of the map do not have enough contrast, which makes them hard to read.
• Theme
  • Find alternative game components for the board besides cubes. Currently, all the pieces on the board are cubes, which is confusing and does not make thematic sense.
  • Rename Constantinople territory to Istanbul.
  • Add pictures to the cards.
• Balance
  • Figure out rules for adding multiple units in a territory.  Placing multiple units in a territory needs to have a useful benefit such as a combat bonus that is easy to understand.

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.