What's new
(Essen SPIEL 24 version)
- can grow animal companion
- tableau of animal crew
- Nyx tower
- animal communities on Behemoth
Start Date
September 28, 2024
Notes
Cooperation:
goal:
- align on high level goals, then each person figures out how to do it
- everybody can suggest ideas on how to synch on high level goals, i.e. non trivial
- there are occasional moments where one can help each other
- interesting perhaps if there are aspects of the mission where one is stronger. As long as that person has significant interesting decisions to make on how to take on that aspect. E.g. a wizard in a dnd session playing support
Current
- need more time between synching moments high level goals
- need more clear things to take care of
Actions:
- remove personalized incentives, eg ⭐ if rescue 🌊
- add abilities that make you more efficient at doing a certain aspect , e.g. 🥾 to 🏞️ to solve it. As long as there's still planning involved in that activity
- event cards:
- save up to 3 animals?
- remove event
- negative effect when you go in location
Possible solutions:
- more actions per turn
- return animals immediately, add choices on the build up
- don't activate nyx until later
- nyx action less disruptive
Status
Done
What's new
- Removed deck building for single usage cards
- Behemoth upgrade Buildings
- Simplified movements and more NYX activations
- Nyx bag > nyx tower
Start Date
September 1, 2024
Notes
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈 Plan 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
- Reduce explanation time
- Reduce map effects
- Animal shadow?
- Nyx streamlined
- when roll dies, place all in dice tower (center of mushroom collective intelligence)
- night time, roll all dice in tower
- look at colour that has majority of 3s (or maybe 1/2s), and activate corresponding ability for a number times equal to number of 3s
- nyx abilities are in a card next to tower (or on map in big mushroom location)
- Reduce deckbuilding?
- Dice behaviour
- don't lose die with 3, and all rolled dice always go to tower
- roll 1 die every 2 steps in track
- MAYBE: dice have successess and some other effects (or fail). only dice with successes go to the tower. x fails on a roll are like a nat 1. When you roll from tower, only count fails?
- Single number challenges
- NO - some events can have 2 or 3, each with a dedicated colour and a fixed number
- More deliveries in a turn & more space to split tasks on those across players
- more movement or less distance
- immediate delivery
- save more animals in one go
- more behemoth events
- Reduce number of paths in the map ✅
- Nyx:
- streamline its phase further ✅
- no tower crumbling in turn 1? ✅
- crumbling towers not on the map
- Dice
- No dice on players board ✅
- no lost dice on 3?
- More turns in a game?
- turns need to be much faster
- perhaps draw 3 cards instead of 4
⏳ Medium prio improvements
- Tweak final Behemoth location
- More getting stronger
- 🔨 Decision hierarchy
- 🔨 Sense of progression
- practically, how does the impact of rangers to the map change over the course of a game? play more cards? affect more regions?
- Choice of Strategies
- prerequisites:
- ability to develop characters so that they are stronger on one aspect (e.g. remove mushroom, or save animals, or rescue animals, or remove sh from B)
- but focus on one strategy leaves you vulnerable to other aspects
- ideally, if you follow one strategy over another, the gameplay is quite different
- Ideas on characterizing animal companions & rangers
- differences between animal companions:
- Tieing cards played colours with unlocking ranger abilities
- e.g. forest animal: if you play 3 forest animals this turn, do X
- Animal skill: static, but very strong
- e.g.: remove 4 mushrooms
- Potentially: flip animal for different profile
- e.g. more aligned to different colour?
- e.g.: better at carrying animal / delivery / challenges?
- differences between rangers:
- how to travel to different regions
- what upgrades available (and how brainy, push your luck, simple, etc they are)
- how many cards to play / discard
💡💡 Ideas
- Animal companion can be flipped back and forth
- represents mode (e.g. cosy vs aggressive) or perhaps is choice of a different companion
- would represent a tactical decision
⏳⏳
Lower prio improvements
- Game Win / Loss description
- 4 stars or less: you lose, no future for humanity
- 4 to 6 stars: you live today, but shadowsphere will overcome
- 7 to 10 stars: some hope for humanity, but not looking good
- 11 stars: good chances for humanity
- 20 stars: humanity is likely safe
- 2 card combos, especially from get go. Potential triggers:
- Play N cards in round + 0 cost cards
- Removed X shadow
- Rescued animal
- Faced event
- Be in Behemoth or on specific terrain type
- N shadows somewhere
- N dice in pool or discarded
- N cards in hand or discarded
- Nyx strength X
- N Shadow regions
- Number rescued animals or events
- Setup timing
Keep an eye out for strategies and variations between games
- Enhanced focus on enabling strategies
- Stronger identity of different tracks / beasts
- More clear separation of powers
- Have 2 cards combos from the get go
- Theme:
- steampunk world needs to come across stronger
- Animal companion to feel more alive
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈 Results from playtesting 🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
✌🏽 Achieved
🧐 What I noticed
🎯Potential goals for next iteration
💚💙 Really loved
from 8.x:
Achieved:
- Shorter game duration - 1.30h including explanation for 4 people
- Rules simpler, but depth of game play!
- More sense of getting stronger
- Reduced alpha gaming, with focus on higher level strategies
- Many interesting choices, but not forced in one direction
- ability to take decisions individually
- Fun cooperation in what animals to take and which events to aim for
- 3/3 players had lots of fun
- Sense of getting stronger through deck building!
- Sense of accomplishment coming from:
- which cards to play
- rescuing animals
- going to locations requiring more boots
- Extra boots seem to work ok!
- Incentive to focus on die of one colour:
- only one colour per challenge
- bonuses coming from dice track
Really loved
- Some push your luck vs playing safe decisions
- Cooperation on when to return to Behemoth and on which tracks to lower
from 7.x:
✌🏽 Achieved
- Dedicated dice storage helps visualize amount of dice of each colour
- More clear decision hierarchy
- Movement within one region constrains nicely decision space
- Easier to parse animal requirements
- Easier to plan around events thanks to dice not getting used
- Movement (= place up to 2 workers per day) is much more streamlined!
- Deck building gives chances to personalize characters further and it's a nice little puzzle to solve
- Did not miss shadow on characters. Streamlined shadow on Behemoth and Mushrooms works so much better
- Night phase is much faster
- Shadow spreading is more balanced
- More streamlined decisions hierarchy
- Unique character track feels simpler
- but it should have more interesting choices
- Animals synergy abilities
- offer some sense of direction
- offer incentive to stay aligned to one colour
- but perhaps there could be 4 per animal
- Interesting decision on how to try and influence Nyx bag
- Cards: feeling some sense of progression, finally!
- 2 action points only made for faster turns
🧐 What I noticed
- Rescued events and animals go in different areas of rangers board - not intuititve
- Not clear what dice colours to gain - the track on rangers board helps to see how many of each colour, but no clear structure to which colour to gain
Challenges:
- events that require necessarily 2 set of coloured dice are too tough to prepare for
Travelling to new region:
- nice incentive coming from solving effects affecting Behemoth (or running away from those affecting me), but meh feeling due to new events revealed that will affect negatively
- animal companions extra abilities difficult to plan for (and easier to activate)
- Behemoth turn felt too long
- Events: it feels uncomfortable wasting a movement, aiming for an animal and not knowing what will happen out of an event
- Grow phase: choice of attribute is not that interesting
- Mushrooms can grow too much, making it hard to rescue
- Some events not balanced
- Not easy to work out shadow to behemoth
- Not too much sense of empowerment
- increase dice gained
- increase cards combos
- A little sense of sameyness between rounds:
- go rescue a certain animal
- remove shadow from somewhere
- Nyx is a bit too punishing between rounds
- too much shadow in one go
- A bit confusing to keep track of:
- shadow on Behemoth
- shadow on characters
- dice on Nyx
- dice on map
- mushroom levels
💚💙 Really loved
- Longer Nyx board works like a charm - scales well, can be better planned for, adds more replayability
- Sense of progression within a region, where you can complete a number of mini missions
- Winning events and having some +1 in reserves helps with dice mitigation strategy
- Learning curve for the game:
- understand how to balance deck
- understand when and how to play extra dice
- understand how to face animals and events
- Thinking when to return animals based on risk that Nyx triggers, and ability to influence that
- Real world locations rocked. They made players look up real locations
- Tension out of drawing from bag. Very clear what colour you want or not
- Some ability to control overall flow of the game through landmarks
- Feeling that there is some deep learning curve
Status
Done
Drag to adjust frozen columns
Alert
Lorem ipsum
Okay