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.