Today, I ran a playtest of Clash of Empires. Here are notes from the playtest.

Results

• Red: 94 points.
• Blue: 87 points.
• Yellow: 97 points.

Observations.

• Players figured out how to play quickly.
• Turns were fast.

Playtester comments

• Players were all hardcore board games.
• Attacking to gain majorities is good.
• Rules were simple to learn.
• Not having dice is good.
• Random setup makes the game too dependent on luck.
• Scoring is tedious.
• Out of the 3 players who played, two players said they would not want to play again. One of them said that if he had time, he would prefer Risk.
• It is necessary to have an incentive to attack before all reinforcements are played.
• It was too easy to knock over troops.
• There is no incentive to attack until you lost your troops.
• Scoring is tedious.
• Random scoring intervals are annoying.

Suggestions for improvements

• There needs to be more tension between deploying and attack.
• Spend points to buy reinforcements.
• Have dice represent troop counts.
• Add cards to represent actions.
• Make sure each player is guaranteed reinforcements.

Based on the suggestions,  I will be focusing on changes that fix the following issues.

• Lack of incentive to attack.
• Add base reinforcement value to each player regardless of territories controlled.
• Add more decision making.