Secret Goals Revisited

I've revised all the secret goals, scaling the points down to 1-3. Remember, these points are scored after the higher score is removed, so 3 points from a goal is like 6 points scored during the game.

Also, based on feedback from the cruise, more of the games are partially achievable, rather than all or nothing.

If seasons do end up giving out secret goals then Speakers for the Dead will have to be removed. I have a couple new candidates to replace it: Gamblers, a new version of an earlier goal, drawing 3 goals brings it closer to Copycats in power, and a new one Hapless, that uses the new "retries" concept.

Seasons

Spring

Summer

Fall

Winter

The above are the options I've come up with so far for each season.

Notes from Playtest One Hundred and Seventeen

Two player playtest with Dan

What we tried

Event marketplace manipulation (need a better name for those resources at the bottom of the event cards) can move resources up or down one, or drop them to the bottom.

Changes to the resource values. Reintroducing plants worth three with a distribution of 3, 2, 2, 1. Birds replace squirrels and have 2 meat, 0 hide. Rabbits have 2 hide and 0 meat.

"Bare handed" hunting. Actually, it's a new piece of equipment that all hunters always have available: a knife. The knife does 1 damage and requires a roll of 12.

Tear drop shaped score markers. They're flat-ish, possibly stackable, and have a point that can aim at the score number of things become crowded.

The game is divided into four seasons, with different rules for what happens when characters die, and new public goals. Each season (except maybe Winter) will have 3-4 different variations.

The game starts in the Spring. Character that die and come back in the Spring will get 1-3 points for equipment, but no goal. We tried 2. Spring includes a shared public goal, and this one is cooperative, intended to help players who are behind get the points they need for better equipment. The goal we tried rewarded all players for not leaving face down disks on the board: 3 if there are none, 2 if there is 1, and 1 if there are 2.

Summer gives re-spawned characters 0-2 points for equipment, we tried 1. Also death gives you an additional goal. The public goal is to explore a long distance from the village. This game we tried "3 points for claiming a corner space". Other variants could be claiming an edge space, a space a certain number of spaces from the village, or a space not touching another claimed space.

Fall gives characters who died a goal, but no points. They may discard a goal for a retry crystal (this was overlooked in our playtest). Other variants could always include a retry. The public goal for Fall is an early reminder that it's time to start balancing out those score. We tried scoring 3 points for having scored an equal number of plants and animals. Other goals could be having balanced (or near balanced) hunt and gather scores, or near balanced total tiles collected whether scored or not.

Winter gives you one extra retry when a character dies and comes back, no goals or points. No public goals, only the players' own secret goals. Winter may be printed directly on the board.

Notes

Fighting a wolf with a knife was so fun! I had a retry and came one roll away from finishing it off.

The rabbit only having hide does make a difference. The intent was that the meat and hide wouldn't both bottom out at the same time when the majority of animals are sold. Another side effect is that the minimum value of an animal becomes 2 points (a rabbit when the hide is valued at 1) instead of 4.

The 3 value plants can lead to some really big scores, Dan got 20 in one turn. But they also make it possible to come back from a large deficit, and inject more gatherer points into the game. I'll keep an eye on whether it's working.

The Tornado event was almost awesome! Dan was pushed all the way to the village, and almost moved all the other characters out of it. It will still get removed, but there's a germ of a good idea in there.

When I write up the rules for seasons I will have to clarify that the "death bonus" comes from the season that you re-spawn in, not the one the character dies in.

I'm really liking the way Seasons are working. Having the death rules on the board helps with teaching. The public goals are important to go after, 3 points is the maximum value those should be. I'm hoping they'll help guide new players too.

This is definitely a 90 minute game now, with events and retries. Sometimes individual turns can go a little long. I had one turn where two events and a torch extended my turn long enough to get me killed by a bear, while carrying a plant in a pouch. It was brutal, but memorable!

Things to try next

Maybe the retry crystals should be kept in the burial ground so that players don't forget to take one when they die.

I need to revisit the player aids, or add more text to the board. Especially with the seasons putting the rules surrounding death in text for everyone to see, there are other rules that it's becoming more clear are missing from the player aids or the board. Those rules include hunting and retries. I should find a place for them.

Text should be larger on the season cards because they're always on the table, you can't pick them up to read them.

Mechanism that hasn't been tried: players taking two turns in a row. Might work as an End of Spring event, where each player takes two turns in a row going around the table. Too powerful for one player to be allowed to do it..

Player Mat Redesign

A new playtester suggested tying in the graphics from the score tracks with the player mats / secret goal cards, to strengthen the association between the sides of the card and which score track they belong to. This is important so that new players put their collected plant and animal tiles on the correct side, so that other players know what they have.

I have a couple designs in contention, both tied in with other cards in the game, so it's purely matter of preference:

Dark Secret Goal / Player Mat card

Light Secret Goal / Player Mat card

Here's the old design, which I still like in some ways, but it doesn't aid in teaching as much as the new one.

Old Card

Marketplace in the Main Board

Marketplace integrated with Village on main board.

The values in the marketplace are the only thing that varies based on the number of players. That's because the number of exploration tiles (and the length of the game) remains constant, meaning that with fewer players, each gets more resources. If the values in a two player game were as high as in a five player game, the two players would exceed the score tracks.

Until now this was achieved by having a double sided mat. In first edition it was the top 1/3 of the board, in the original printing of 2nd edition it was an 8"x2" mat that sat on top of the board and slid all over the place until I made corner pockets to hold it. This solution was not repeatable, and the mat added extra cost to the game.

Here's my first sketch of the new idea for having both sets of numbers co-exist:

And here's what my first pass at the graphic design looks like. You can see it with the value tiles revealing only the correct set of numbers for a three player game at the top of this post.

Bare Handed Hunting

Knife

A common request from players is to be able to go hunting bare handed. This may be because suicide is a strategy (see my earlier post on Seasons). Or it may be a more visceral thing. Either way, it might be a nice addition to the game.

I came back to it while thinking about the knife, a short lived piece of equipment from an earlier hunting system. As a person living in the 22nd century, I never go anywhere without my pocket knife, why would a primitive hunter?

Mechanically, the knife is a piece of equipment that players don't have to buy. It doesn't take up one of the hunter's 3 equipment slots, and it's not even a card, it's embedded in the graphics of the board. Using the knife to hunt is always an option.

Exploration Tiles - Birds

UPDATE:

I got some great feedback on the animal tiles, here's the latest iteration.

ORIGINAL:

Exploration Tiles

Squirrels may be replaced by birds, with a Quail and Pheasant shown on the far left (need to pick one).

The big play balance difference in these new tiles is that now the majority of animals have only meat or hide, not both. I'm hoping this will allow for more good opportunities to score. Until now, whenever someone scored even a rabbit or squirrel it would completely tank the market for anyone else wanting to score an animal.

At this small size light text on a dark background was too hard to read, so I've switched back to dark text.

The deadly animals an now distinguished by their red text. Also, the fangs have been replaced by the gatherer icon, to indicate which character needs to roll that number.


I've also done these on a plain white background. It doesn't look as nice, but may be easier to read in print (it's pretty harsh on screen).

Seasons

Seasons

Seasons started out while playtesting on the cruise. When playing multiple games, the event tiles would get bunched up, and one person might draw 4 or 5 in a row. Their turn would go on long enough that they'd start feeling back. So I started dividing the event tiles evenly between four stacks.

The next evolution came with the idea that there should be more goals to work towards, because the secret goals cane be arbitrarily difficult. I'm using this opportunity to guide the players towards better / more interesting play.

Another piece of feedback was that death is too good. Experienced players know that you want to die once or twice early in the game to get extra goals, preferably while your other character holds on to your valuable equipment. By changing what happens when a character dies each season I can hopefully reduce the number of character suicides. Also, some seasons will simply grant more goals at their end. This might spell the end for on of my favorite goals: Speaker for the Dead.

An additional bonus is not having to refer to the rulebook to see what happens when a character dies.

Each season will have 3-4 different variations, except for maybe Winter, since there's enough going on during the end game without extra rules. If it is always the same, I'll leave a graphic of the card built in to the board.

JoCo Cruise 2018 Playtests

I got so much great feedback on the cruise!

Here are the playtests I ran:

One Hundred and Ten

One Hundred and Eleven

One Hundred and Twelve

One Hundred and Thirteen

One Hundred and Fourteen

One Hundred and Fifteen

One Hundred and Sixteen

Below I'll summarize all the changes that I'll be making and experiments I'll be running based on notes taken on the ship.

While on ship we made pockets to stop the Marketplace mat from sliding.

Graphic Design / UX Notes

1. Exploration tiles should have a white background for maximum legibility at their small size. Deadly animals will have red numbers and icons.
2. Deadly animals: instead of fangs, have gathered meeple icon with the number to indicate what the number is for (gatherer's escape roll).
3. Integrate the Marketplace mat with the main board (illustration below).
4. Move hunt track to other side because that's where the hunter equipment is.
5. Make the score tracks larger so that we can use Ticket to Ride style flat wooden scoring disks.
6. Put silhouettes of the pieces under the score tracks.
7. Player aids should have red/green sides with graphics from the score tracks to further connect those concepts.
8. Make an area on the board for discard event tiles.
9. Make spaces on the board for the Seasons cards.
10. The six events that go on the board should have a tone on tone green event icon on the back.
11. Split colors on the box art?

This is my idea for how to eliminate the separate Marketplace mat
and still have different values for 4-5 players than with 2-3 players

Experiments

1. Animals update: rabbit becomes two hide zero meat, wild turkey replaces squirrel and is two meat zero hide.
2. Goals and benefits associated with each season: 4 possibilities for each of the four seasons. For example, re-spawning gets you X points only during Spring, Everyone gets a goal at the beginning/end/first-event of the Summer. Have to think of shared goals that don't just reward the player who is ahead, if anything they should be catch-up mechanisms.
3. Time to revisit the secret goals! Make sure all goals can be actively worked towards. Add more goals that care about placement.
4. Improved or cheaper sling, maybe even make sling do 2 damage, bow & arrow 1. If bow does less damage, it should cost 4, pouch should cost 3, and players start with 3 or fewer points. If sling does more damage, spear is looking weaker, so spear could change so that it's only discarded when you miss (or hit?). Probably better to not have the sling do more damage which makes it clearly better than club or spear, but just lower the cost.
5. New gatherer equipment: moccasins, cost 2 move 4/5 spaces 
6. More bluffing opportunities. Empty/free exploration tiles that could be claimed immediately or left there would add more bluffing. Drawing an event card could be optional, just leave it there and use/collect a retry.
7. Long range weapons: one option for incentivizing the more expensive weapons in 4-5 player games would be to make characters using the AtlAtl, Bow, and Sling immune to deadly animals. Since these weapons already have really good odds, it wouldn't be a huge functional change to the game. Maybe less exciting though.
8. Tornado: isn't working as intended, try a new way of determining the direction it takes you.
9. Include an odds table in the back of the rules, share it with the playtesters at the start of the game.
10. Retry: re-roll one die instead of all three.
11. Pick your goal when you die, but don't keep it until you use that character again.
12. Everyone starts with a sling and no points.
13. Change the number of spaces moved depending on the number of players.

Corrections

1. Allow market manipulation to drop a resource to the bottom. Moving it to the top is too powerful, wrapping it around only from the topmost space to the bottom is more limiting and makes less sense.
2. Market manipulation should be usable at any time during that turn, even split up before two sales, or in between selling of meat and hide.
3. The staggered starting points didn't work out, it was too complicated for little gain. Everyone will start with 2 points on each track. If points for equipment go down I could try basing the total starting points on the number of players. It would probably be either one point per player, or one less than that.
4. Verify that Speaker for the Dead and Survivor note goals that the goals don't have to be scored.
5. Celestial phenomenon: get rid of the "of all 3 match"
6. View from a bluff has a typo "to not" should be "do not"
7. View from a bluff: should be if either character has a weapon.
8. Territorial don't say "on the sides"
9. Goals that say ties don't count should specify what kind of tie.
10. Pathfinder: clarify that it is a straight line.
11. Master Scout: can't name the events in the corner.
12. Copycat: clarify that you need to see if you could accomplish the goal you are copying.
13. Reconsider number of points for the goal that requires hoarding equipment.
14. Rules clarification: you can re-roll a successful roll with a retry.
15. Tall Tree: clarify what the correct character/space means.
16. Wandering Trader: clarify if can manipulate market with events.
17. Atlatl Event: too powerful early game, should not include the option of buying a spear.
18. Temperance - score some points if they are close but not the same.
19. Haggler should be 3 points.
20. Wolf Master should score points for one wolf.
21. Brave should also give scaled points.
22. Fog should require that you be moved to an empty space. The way it's worded now the player moving the character should always move you to a space with something on it, but rarely do because the full text of the card is not read aloud.
23. Snare should not be able to draw past the current season. Lots of edge cases and clarifications required with this one, might have to lose it.
24. Potlatch: FAQ that you can discard equipment.
25. Tall tree: complicated. 
26. Strange mushrooms: clarify that you draw them one at a time.
27. Rabid beast: should say "end of" your following turn.
28. FAQ: can two characters who are maxed out on equipment exchange?
29. Goals that mention "trade points" should say "cost" instead and have shell symbol.

JoCo Cruise 2018 Playtesters