Notes from Eighty-ninth and Ninetieth Playtests

Lester, Ryan, and Kris
at Game Häus Cafe

What we tried

• Players only explore once per turn.
• Collect a hunger cube when you fail to find something, use it later to explore a second time.

Current rules around this have more complexity than fits nicely on a player aid: your turn ends after a single explore if you hunt an animal, it doesn't end if you are a gatherer and escape a deadly animal, it ends if you claim the space.

Notes

With this new approach you are guaranteed to get something every turn, an exploration disk, a hunger cube, or killed. And getting killed is often not a bad thing, as I'll discuss further in a moment. It reduces the complexity of most turns, and keeps the game flowing smoothly.

Conclusions

Overall everyone agreed is a great change. I need to work on the wording of the rules, to clarify whether a hunger cube can be used when hunting and you miss. We played that you could, but it was confusing. I'll take the opportunity to revisit the clarity around hunting - that when you miss your turn is always over. I noticed some confusion around this in a review on The Game Crafter.

Last year I overhauled the goals, adding some new ones and increasing their value. I needed the goals to be able to swing the winner of the game, to keep everyone engaged up until the end. The points needed to be scaled up to fit with higher scores because, by popular demand, I increased the game length from 45-60 minutes to 60-75 minutes. The problem this created, which has always been there to a certain degree, is that suicide became a broken strategy. So I created a limit of 6 goals. From recent playtesting it would appear that there is still a problem, as the game is now you need to die 4 or 5 times to be in contention to win the game.

Next Steps

• Continue working on the wording of the rules.
• Experiment with a limit of 4 or 5 goals.
• New idea: fleshing out a terrain idea from a review of Hunt or Gather on The Game Crafter by turning the "tar pits" into event disks, that you flip over and something happens (some good, some bad, some altering things like the market).