The Good
No questions or concerns regarding rules. The flow of play is fast, just as intended, with really short turns. They liked the game, said it was lots of fun. They really liked the theme. They liked the marketplace supply/demand track. They wanted to keep playing when it ended.Opportunities
The game should be longer, I've heard this before. Easily solved by adding more plant and animal disks. I've done the math earlier and it stays balanced when I go from 24 to 36. Until now it's been playtested during lunch, so a 45 minute play time was key. Now it could go up to an hour or a bit more, more than that and it's playing longer it should. It's not a stuffy 90 minute euro game, or a drawn out 4 hour ameritrash dice feet, it's a tightened modern blend of the positive aspects of those two types of games. (See my Euro/American Hybrid article.)The equipment isn't differentiated enough, and maybe not powerful enough. You can spend a lot of points on an Atlatl and then die from a mediocre roll. I've done the math and I know that with the bell curve one point makes a big difference, but perception matters, and I think the better equipment could be more effective, and more expensive. More on that in the conclusion.
The goals could be a bigger part of the game. They could be harder, take more effort than luck, and make up a larger portion of the final score. If I do this, I'll have to do something about the suicide strategy, one I've known about for a while, but was executed to perfection by blind playtester Erin Snyder. Maybe when a character dies you only get points for equipment or another goal, not both.
Conclusion
Looked at as a whole, I think the underlying issue in the feedback I got from this video review of Hunt or Gather has to do with narrative arc.The game has good tension as you're trying to time the market, and that builds at the end of the game. But the end does sneak up quickly, and the characters lack that growth that you find in most American games. In general you can buy whatever you want at the beginning, so there isn't the ramping up in power. And it is often possible to see who is going to win before the secret goal scoring. By expanding the secret goals, pricing the best equipment above the starting points, and lengthening the game, I think I can increase the sense of rising action, and keep the tension going through to the resolution.
