The Second Play Test

I wasn’t able to have my game played at the Game Design Club, but when I got home I finished up my remaining work on it and sat down to play immediately. A few issues with the game became quite obvious very quickly.

My game is Incredibly unbalanced…

I had taken the advice of my peers and put all the monster cards into one pile. The levels ranged from 0-10 with a 13 and 15 thrown in for kicks. Right out of the gate all we got were the hard ones. After much frustration I decided to sort the piles back into the easy medium and hard like I had done originally. This made the game much more fun. I’ve decided it was something I was going to keep.

We started over and my roommate was on a roll. She enjoyed the game much more then I since she would draw a lot of easy monsters, and fate cards that benefitted her. I drew the opposite.

I found it very difficult to gain levels in my game, but very easy to lose them. I ended the game at level zero while her magic and strength were over five. Still at her level it would have been impossible for her to win.

I realized and told her about halfway through the game that my game was impossible to win due to the imbalance. I was pleased to find that regardless of this she wanted to keep playing. We played my game from 11:00 P.M. till 2:00 A.M. I can say fairly that my game is fun at least.

There were a lot of moments of high intensity where you really felt that your life was on the line.

Other than the flaws with leveling up I realized that I needed to make the rules of combat and leveling up more clearly, and the gaining of abilities needs to be more consistent.

Additionally I changed the way combat works, but it became confusing very fast. There was your levels on the card, your levels on the board, the addition boosts from abilities, and the roll of the dice to add. The adding wasn’t hard, but looking at all three spaces at once was a bit difficult. I wish to simplify the combat system further since some things worked with the game, while other didn’t

Lastly I have fate cards that are used for five turns. I am going to make something that can go on these cards too represent how many times something has been used to help players keep better track of their things. All and all there was too much to keep track of…

I have also finally decided on how I wish to design my board. I am going to make a board that is like a Candy Land- Life hybrid...