Playtests Seventy-eight through Eighty

With this round of development, prompted by a video review of the game, I'm revisiting the secret goals to raise their stakes, and make them more skill based.

Current Goal Landscape

Before we could begin thinking about new goals, I needed to know what I have. I decided to lay out the goals on the table in a matrix graph, plotting left to right the time during the game at which it's critical to engage with the goal, and top to bottom the degree of control vs. luck. We did this with 3x5 cards as labels, laying the cards out on the table as you can see in this picture:

Goal "Graph"

Good, there was nothing in the bottom-left corner, luck driven goals that you have to act on from the beginning. But I could use more goals in the top-right, skill based goals that can be acted upon from the middle to the end of the game.

Here are some new goal ideas Dan and I came up with and have been trying out:

• Survivor: 7 points for ending the game with only this goal, 3 points if only one other.
• Temperate: 5 points for having equal hunt and gather scores.
• Haggler: 7 points for ending the game with both characters in the village, and all disks scored.
• Gambler: 2 points guaranteed, or trade this goal in to draw a new goal.
• Hoarder: 5 points for ending the game with more than 10 points worth of equipment.
• All In: 7 points for ending the game with no equipment.

I'd also like to come up with a goal that has to do with the state of the market at the end of the game, possibly related to un-scored disks. Every goal must be based on something saved in the state of the pieces at the end of the game. Most are based on disks collected, or spaces claimed, but I'm exploring other possibilities such as the location of the characters, equipment owned, and potentially un-scored disks.

Raising the Stakes

I've gone through and nearly doubled the points that you score for goals. Before the goals were usually between 3 and 6 points, now they are 6 to 10.

Playtest Notes

Playtest 78

To balance the additional value of the goals, and try to counter the suicide strategy, when characters die and re-spawn, players must choose either 4 points, or a new goal, not both.

This new rule collided with one of the new goals: Survivor. Survivor was based on the premise that each time a character dies you get get another goal, and so it scored 9 points for what was intended to be never dying. But since it is now possible to die and not get another goal, the points scored had to be adjusted down, after Dan exploited it for a very high score of course.

Playtest 79

Another thing that came out of these playtests, completely unrelated from the goals, is the starting placement of the village. We always try different tar pit placements every game, and playtest 79 (see photo) came up with a new setup that makes for a very competitive game. Instead of allowing players to take separate paths (see photo from playtest 78), this setup forces competition ever a narrow access point to the rest of the board.

Playtest 80

Testing goals is a time intensive process, because it requires playing through a full game to evaluate only a handful of goals (depending on how often characters died). One thing I've been doing to increase our insight into the goals came from trying to evaluate the new Gambler goal. With that goal you may choose to replace it with a random new goal. To know how many points to assign the default value of the goal, I need to calculate the expected value of a random goal. At the end of each game we have been dealing out the remaining goals and determining which ones would score points, how many points that would be, and dividing it by the number of goals to get an expected value of a random goal. So far they have been averaging about a point and a half. Note that this is not the same expected value as a goal gained during the game when players have time to act on them.