Notes from Playtests Eighty-one and Eighty-two

Playtest 81

The focus now is playing lots of games to test the new goals. A couple of them had some issues.

Haggler is probably over-pointed at 7 points, players sell everything they can more often than not, so getting rewarded for that behavior doesn't add that much to the experience.

All In, where you score points for having no equipment left over at the end,was an interesting experiment but in practice it doesn't make sense to play the whole game with disposable equipment, torches and spears. Because of this impracticality, to achieve the goal you have to die later in the game, and suicide as a strategy is something I'm trying to discourage.

Playtest 82

Paranoid is extremely difficult and only ever works if you have it from the start. Increasing points to 12 to try it again. 

Pathfinder and Wanderers are about right. I gave up 5-6 potential points to score Wanderers.

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.

Bow & Arrows vs. Atlatl & Spear

Let's take a closer look at the math behind the new more powerful but also more expensive Bow and Atlatl. Each now costs 5 points and has become easier to hit with. You need to roll a 7 for the Bow, and an 8 for the Atlatl.

Everyone understands the Atlatl. In this game it's basically a prehistoric bazooka. At an 84% chance to hit, it's going to succeed a little more than 4 out of 5 tries, and doing 4 damage will destroy even the deadly animals in one shot.

The Bow is a little trickier. Arrows do half as much damage as Atlatl/Spear, so it takes two hits to kill a deadly animal (which have 3 or 4 life). But it's a more accurate weapon, hitting 90% of the time. Arrows are also cheaper, costing 1/2 point per shot. So, a Bow is a better weapon against smaller animals, and perfect against a deer. Hitting twice however reduces your odds to less than the Atlatl at 81%, and the ammunition not only costs as much, but it uses up the entire Arrow card.

So, the subtle numeric differences allow each to be optimal in specific situations, but both are still versatile enough to justify the higher cost, and allow for player taste.

This is what I really like about the 3 six-sided dice system, the bell curve allows me to make significant changes in the probability with small changes in the numbers. 

October 12th Update:

I found another happy accident in the math. A bear takes 4 damage to kill, which is the same amount that a club does, with 37% accuracy. A sling and a spear, if you hit with both, will also do 4 damage, and coincidentally, also has a 37% chance of success!

Now, there are plenty of other differences between those weapons. A club costs 1 point, spear and sling cost 2 points each. The club always has a 37% chance of success. Spear and Sling, used individually, have much better odds. Sling against rabbit or squirrel is 74%, sling against deer (2x) is 55%, and spear against wolf or boar is 50%.

Notes from Seventy-seventh Playtest

click to enlarge

What we tried

You may turn in unused equipment at the village for points which my be used immediately to buy new, more expensive, equipment.

Notes

Upgrade allowed me to take a strategy where I began with a sling and then upgraded it to a bow and arrow attempting to accomplish a Crack Shot goal. Dan was successful picking up a bow late in the game to secure the "furthest from the village" Explorer goal. At one point in the game I was losing pretty badly so I went out with an Atlatl and killed both a Wolf and a Boar, which scored 18 points in a single turn.

Conclusion

It's working really well not starting out with these weapons that are now more powerful, but being able to shift strategies later and upgrade. Being able to upgrade will also make it easier on beginning players. The decision about what to buy on your first turn is not nearly as final, you can explore various weapons throughout the game.

The game now feels like it has a beginning, middle, and end. It's always had that frantic rush at the end as players race to make one more score, or accomplish one more goal. But the rest of the game, with all the equipment more or less at your disposal from the beginning, has been more flat up until now. It makes sense, in a 45 minutes game you want to drop right into the middle of the action. Now that I'm looking at increasing it to an hour I can afford to ease into the game.

Next Steps

Goals! Should they be worth more points? Can they be more skill based? Should you get points and a goal when a character dies, or only one? Are there any we haven't thought of or tried?

Notes from Seventy-sixth Playtest

click to enlarge

What we tried

Bow and Atlatl now cost 5.

Notes

A bad roll, coupled with a mistake, will still lose you this game. But at the same time, we learned the value of the Bow & Arrow's 90% chance to hit.

Conclusion

The powerful equipment is now firmly out of the early game.

It does not make sense to buy the expensive equipment when you already have a weapon, unless what you currently have is a spear and you're buying an Atlatl.

Next Steps

Try out a rule where you can upgrade equipment.

Notes from Seventy-fifth Playtest

Weapon	Roll to Hit	Odds of Hitting	Notes
Club	12	37%	13 would be 26%
Sling	9 (+1)	74% (-10%)	2 hits is 55%
Spear	11 (+1)	50% (-12.5%)
Atlatl	8 (-1)	84% (+10%)
Bow	7 (-1)	90% (+6%)	2 hits is 81%

older edition (green explore disks)

What we tried

The above hunting odds adjustments, and Bow/Atlatl costs raised to 4, and fixed the starting equipment at 4, regardless of how many players.

Notes

Dan went sling + spear, missed a lot with sling, but with terrible rolls. I went Atlatl with no spears, gathered, sold, bought a spear and got killed.

Dan eventually had success with his sling, and I came back with a spear, eventually buying another Atlatl after some successful gathering.

Conclusion

We agree that being able to start out with an Atlatl or Bow without any ammunition feels like you're trying to game the system rather than playing within the theme.

Next Steps

Next test will price those equipment higher so that you can't start with them.

Hunt or Gather Video Review by GotGameTesters

View on YouTube

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.