Notes from Sixth Playtest

Playtest ran 35 minutes and we completed 12 rounds.

What we tested...

Gatherers can be killed by Wolf & Bear
It came up twice, we forgot the rule once, and Kris didn't die the other time :(

Bows can shoot one space away
Kris said at 3/2 it does still feel under powered, and feels like an insecure/unsafe weapon if you're using it against an animal on the same space that you're on (probably because it doesn't do enough damage to kill a deadly animal). Also it only worked ok because there were enough arrows to last the limited number of turns we played.

Swapping is a free action
Didn't really come up. Market started out with Meat & Hide at the bottom, we drew a bunch of stupid birds. All the plants were scarce and valuable.

General Observations:

• Hunt has lost over Gather since we increased the value of the gather tiles (Correction: Hunt won in my 22 round 2 player game with Cybil)
• Part of the problem is Meat & Hide move quickly down in market value
• Killing a bear = winning :P
• The smaller animals (birds & squirrels) are weak, they're hard to kill and not worth much
• Pouches are still very powerful. Luckily we each got at least one.

Possible Solutions:

• Trading low-valued tiles for equipment, and having them move up in value might help when Meat or Hide get stuck at 1 (but don't want to worry too much about Hunt/Gather balance, I can fix it with the numbers)
• Maybe a hunter should be able to take more than one animal per turn, but only if they're face down on the board and small?
• The Bow - I'd like to try having the bow itself come with one arrow, you'd turn it upside down once it was used. We could also try making it 4/2, but I think the critical difference between arrows and spears is that spears can be used by themselves.

Other ideas tossed about...

• Eliminate the selling of equipment entirely, or reduce it to 1 point
• Don't having damage markers carry over from turn to turn with wounded animals, that way we could remove another component.