Iterate my board game design

Final playtest complete! It went quite well. This is the fewest notes I’ve taken during a playtest for sure.

• The removal of dual regions in favor of upgrades at the Temple feels great.
• All of the QoL stuff for TTS was very useful
• The Shrine cards need renaming, and maybe rethinking. In general, it doesn’t feel like they have a purpose, the small deck clogging factor wasn’t super impactful.
• Removing the “discard whatever you want to at end of turn” rule seemed fine.

Overall, I’m extremely happy with the progress I’ve made over the past thirty days. The game is really starting to feel like a deep strategy/tactics game now that a lot of the design flaws have been patched up. There’s still plenty of balancing and refinement to do, which is expected, but overall the game’s in a much better state than the beginning. Best of all, I’ve still got energy for it and want to keep ironing things out from this point, making this kind of progress feels great.

All right, ready for another playtest. Turns out, taking a day off work greatly increased productivity. Here’s the updates:

• Removed the “discard whatever you want at end of turn” mechanic that felt awkward and a little to “just have to know the rules”-y. Instead, Shrine cards have a “discard this at end of turn” text on them.
• Dual ability acquisition happens entirely at the Temple now. Dual Regions have been removed from the game, for now. This will also make the single Temple a hot spot in the center of the map, and makes it useful again, rather than an artifact from older builds.
• Added more QoL stuff to TTS, including snap points for all the places cards commonly go.

One last playtest to go for this DK30.

Did what I would call the “Week 3 Playtest” yesterday.

This version’s updates:

• Deckbuilder mode. You have a set deck of starter elemental cards. Claiming adds to your deck.
• The win condition is now “Claim All of your Opponent’s Home Tiles”
• The Home Tiles are special, in that they don’t do anything other than mark your spawn point
• Each element and dual have an ordered deck of abilities, the deeper you get into them, the more powerful they become. You can go wide with a lot of moderate abilities, or go deep into an element and get very powerful effects.
• Claiming an opponent’s shrine puts a card in your deck that does nothing.

Playtested with two college buddies, here’s the highlights from my notes:

• Didn’t quite have time to generate all the necessary assets, so there was definitely a lot of confusion to the deckbuilding. This could also be because you start with a deck of 4, and 4 cards in hand, so there was absolutely no feedback to what to do with your cards in hand for the first few turns.
• The player shrines doing nothing felt awful. It meant your basic spawn point was worthless. Definitely going to make “home” and “claim” markers for the next iteration.
• The Dual upgrade system feels awkward now.
• There’s a definite desire for some amount of discard/trash mechanics

Positive feedback:

• The new win condition definitely promotes positional play and makes attacking feel much more natural in the game. There’s a learning curve here that isn’t too steep, if the same group played again, we’d all take much more positional tactics.
• The core deckbuilding mechanics feel really good. Multiple points of feedback include wanting to play again to try different elements, and knowing that you didn’t construct your deck well and wanting to play again to do better
• For now, I think deckbuliding is the way to go, and will be how the game operates in the near future

I’ve got a test lined up for this weekend, so I’m going to spend most of today getting it ready. Things I want to iterate on:

• What cards you start with and quantities, such as hand size
• Create Home and Claim markers
• Do a second pass on the abilities, which were somewhat tossed together last minute and work
• Decide how to handle dual ability acquisition

Another successful playtest last night! Thanks to Holosmoss, YellowSnowman, and loopyloo for playing. After sleeping on it, here are the points of interest.

Positive feedback:

• The simplicity of the game rules is still effective and appealing. This was one of my larger design criteria that has been successful.
• The graphics work I did was largely successful. The individual card backs per player were clear. The visuals of pairing the opposing dual cards made seeing player progress very easy.
• A fair bit of fun was had. Several big plays and big moments happened. That’s always a good thing and a good sign for a game.
• Timing is still good, just around an hour, with the slightly larger board and four players all making decisions.
• Snaking turn order still good.
• A lot of being able to plan ahead, and also predicting what opponents might do and play around it. A lot of good tactical play happening, and even a few mistakes. I like seeing that it’s complex enough that mistakes can happen.

I have a lot more constructive feedback this time around. I think it took a few plays of this version to get a feel for the issues. That in itself is progress.

• Tabletop Simulator continues to be finnicky at times. I think I’m going to sit down with the next build and do some solo testing and fix a lot of the smaller issues.
• Despite all of my visual work, its still not immediately clear how to get the dual cards. The icons are likely too small on the tiles and need to be bigger, if I even keep the same method for gaining duals. More on that further down.
• The basic cards need pictures of what they do. I made the icons, I should use them. Had to hover to read them.
• Not necessarily a bad thing, but an observation, the snaking order means you end up bullying your neighbor who goes after you 3/4 of the turns.
• Fire still kind of sucks early, as it has no role when all you want to do is power up. So being stuck with two Fire tiles in your opening deal isn’t great.
• Without Air, its very hard to get across the board. The player with a bunch of Air tiles around them won, it was much easier for them to win when the win conditions are across the board from each other.
• The dual cards ended up being just objective points. You are so heavily disincentivized to playing them that basically no one did.
• Similarly, it feels bad to get your one Water (for example) card for the game, and you’re forced to upgrade it to have a chance at winning. Also feels bad.

The two major things I want to address in the next build are how bad it feels to spend the ability cards you worked hard to get, and the objective progressing/win condition. The idea I want to pursue for the first point is to become more of a deck builder. Highlights for this would be

• Start with a small-ish deck of basic abilities.
• Claiming draws you an ability card into your discard that shuffles when you have to draw and your deck is empty.
• Playing Elemental abilities doesn’t trash the card, just discards them. So you can keep all of your hard-earned ability cards, you just might not see them again right away.
• Dual abilities can still be gained by trashing basics of the two single elements. This can keep that requirement so they can be suitably powerful, and not accessible in the opening turns.
• Opens up design space for deck-manipulation abilities such as draw, discard, and trash. Trashing especially can give Fire a much needed early-game role.

As for the win condition, that’s going to require some more thought. But maybe that becomes clearer as I work toward a deck builder style iteration.

I have a plan for this weekend’s playtest, I think.

• Temple’s non-win-the-game ability will be straight from previous iterations: Copy an ability previously played this turn. (Discard after use)
• Temple’s ability card will be a wild-card for upgrades (making it even more appealing to hold center map)
• Temple’s ability card will have a limited stock all players. One per player, or maybe two total?
• The dual regions I’m not going to change. I still haven’t come up with anything, and I’m now curious to see how much change the Temple ability will induce. I’m also a fan of smaller changes since the balance currently seems pretty good.
• Tiles and Ability Cards will now have symbols for clarity. WIP Example:

• Dual Regions will need more details to explain discarding specific element cards, but that shouldn’t be too much more complicated.
• Current symbol designs:

They’re simple, but I’m not going to do anything complicated when it could all still change.

Hopefully I can put all the tile changes together quickly, but its shockingly tedious work. Haven’t been able to work on it at any length because it just takes so long and I keep tweaking it. Still aiming for a weekend playtest, though.

Ok, so the “iterate weekly” plan may have been a bit aggressive. I whiffed entirely on a playtest this weekend, as there is more I still want to do before the next time I put the game in front of people.

First, I’ve had some ideas for Ability Card clarity to avoid the confusion from the last playtest. This includes:

• Ability Name
• One/All symbols for both number of users and number of targets
• Elemental affilitaion symbols
• Basic Ability symbols (Move, Attack, Create, Claim)
• Targeting range

I’ve already sketched most of the symbols and actually generated graphics for the targeting range symbols:

I think these are very clear and concise, visually, I’m happy with them.

I also have one more design feature to implement. From the last update, I want to have the Dual Regions and Temple do things when you can’t upgrade. I have a great idea for the Temple, but am still drawing a blank for the dual tiles. This is primarily why I haven’t done a fresh playtest, and I’ll try to have this resolved soon. In the mean time, working up ability card visuals is a good use of time.

Also, the FF7 Remake is not helping productivity :)

A shot of the game in Tabletop Simulator, before the board is setup

First DayKnight playtest was conducted with surprising amounts of success. Had to quickly improvise the three player setup, but it worked out just fine. Shoutouts to AuElephant, Rickshaw, and loopyloo for playing! Here are the major bullets from the test:

• Rules took slightly longer to walk through and explain than I’d have liked, but some of that was possibly due to several-step board setup.
• Balance issues from the pre-DK30 build were non-existent. Play seem to flow quite well from the start, thanks to the board setup steps and balanced abilities. Play was surprisingly peaceful in the opening turns, but if these players play again I suspect that might not be the case.
• Strategic and tactical plays were both on display, as two players drew hard Elemental lines on the map, and used dual-element abilities to make power plays.
• Only a small number of Tabletop Simulator-related issues this time
• Only one major card rule question came up

Post-game thoughts:

• The snaking mechanic for abilities being played continues to be highly regarded, this is further positive reinforcement
• Players who read the rules beforehand initially thought the dual-element abilities were way too powerful, but after playing the abilities seemed more fair
• Theming was mostly on point, and was swaying the players towards what they identified with. This is not a problem, per say. Interesting to note that you may not be able to play the element you want with a random board layout.
• Modular board design might need to be an even larger focus, to make multiple plays of the game interesting
• One design note: its hard to tell who’s winning. I might want to try each player having their own set of draw piles for each zone. Color coding the card backs could make that easy to see.
• Most importantly, feedback was very positive. Everyone claimed to have enjoyed the game, one saying he’d buy it as-is and play it on repeat. Not that it’s ready for that.

Updates for next playtest:

• Clean up the TTS jank (pawn colors not loading properly, cards locking to board)
• Fix verbiage issues
• Create color-coded card backs for each player’s draw pile
• Major design goal: Figure out a way to interact with dual tiles and the temple without being able to upgrade abilities
• Major design goal: Decide how much it changes the game if non-basic abilities aren’t discarded after use, only after upgrade

Updates from the pre-DK30 playtest have been implemented. The current rule set is here:

Elemental Battle Rules Doc

I’ve done a slight balance tweak to one of Earth’s main abilities, added a new way to setup the board, and added the hand limit to prevent some degenerative play. I’ve also updated the TTS build with some QoL improvements. Next up: Playtest.