Notes from Fifty-first Playtest

Experimental Weapon: Knife

New Equipment
In my previous post I showed how there is space in the numbers for another piece of basic equipment. Today we tried out the knife as illustrated here. With its effectiveness against the Deer and Bear, it is under-valued at 2 points. My math only took into account the odds of hitting, it was missing the value of the animals it is good at killing.

To Try: raise the cost of the knife to 3, lower the cost of the sling to 2.

Secret Goals
Starting to test the secret goals in earnest here (not just me mucking around with solo plays). Here's what we tried today:

Gather: like with the old Hunt/Gather prediction card, this is more or less a guess, only as a goal you don't even get to make the guess yourself. Ditching this and Hunter.

Paranoid: the best result of measuring your area using diagonals, even if we changed it so that it counted diagonal plus orthogonal, would be to have a better chance of winning the largest territory bonus. But that's pretty lame compared to actually getting additional points. Couple that with other changes I'm going to make (see End Game Scoring below), and this one is out.

Explorer: this one is fun because it gives you something specific to do throughout the game. Five points may be high, since this is something that isn't too hard to deliberately accomplish and being away from the pack is helpful anyway. Maybe this should go down to 4 points?

Hoarder: This one is fun, but a bit random. The wording was unclear, but turns out it's better to allow multiple pairs of tiles, but I'm going to lower them to 2 points per pair. Still 5 points per set of 3 (there are only 2 of each animal, so it's really hard to do).

End Game Scoring
The 5 point largest territory bonus has been the deciding factor in too many games. This is because if there are two players who are vying for the lead, it becomes more like a 10 or 20 points. They double in value because normally half your points are discarded through only scoring the lower track (more than half if you didn't balance perfectly), but the end game bonus is applied directly to your final score. And double again because they are points that you gain, but your opponent does not.

Conclusion: I'm going to reduce the largest territory bonus to 2 or 3 points, so that it is truly a tie breaker. Or maybe 3 points for the largest, 1 for the second largest, or 2 points each for a tie?

Other Ideas
Kris suggested, and I'd thought of this before, that we might want to be able to collect more secret goals, along with penalties for not completing them. More hidden scoring through non-obvious strategies could improve the game.