Board Game – Play testing

Goal of the week – play testing

The goal this week was to play test and tweak our game so that we had a good and balanced version that could be play tested by other groups at the play testing session this Thursday.

What we did

One of the first issues we had to fix was that the wizard became too powerful too quickly. So we changed so that instead of automatically gaining one extra mana each turn the wizard only gained mana from when the heroes explored new tiles. We also had to balance the +/- effects on the tiles so that there was a even spread of gaining and loosing mana.  After testing some we also added spells in the wizard deck that let him spend mana to gain more mana to use later. This let the wizard have more things to spend his mana on earlier in the game.
We also added more low mana monsters and traps to the wizard deck in order to compensate for the slower mana acceleration.

Another issue we had to fix was that if the players stuck together they became very strong and almost impossible to stop for the wizard. To fix this we added more cards to the wizard deck that punish players if the stick together. Here are some of the cards we added:

The goal of the cards were to split up groups of heroes or punish them for sticking together. The cards worked great and created some really fun and exciting moments in the game. The heroes would be fighting together almost reaching the wizard tower and then suddenly Switcheroo would take the hero carrying the keys and place him at the other end of the map, forcing the players to fight through another wave of monsters and traps to rescue him.
We only added a few copies of these cards to the deck as the effects were very powerful and would get boring and frustrating for the heroes if it happened to often.

On Wednesday we had a play testing session with Marcus which went well, he got to play both as the wizard and as a hero and he enjoyed the game. He told us to test having the tiles hidden until any monsters in them has been defeated, that way if a hero walks into a room and get beaten back he will not know if there is a key under the tile.

Before the Thursday play testing I wrote a post on the main blog with the latest and updated rules for the game, they can be found here.

On Thursday we went to the play testing session together with other groups. One group got to test our game and gave us some feedback. They thought that the wizard was to weak in the beginning of the game and to strong at the end, that the heroes needed more buffs and potions to make them able to fight the monsters in the later parts of the game and that traps were to powerful. They also thought the game took to long (their session lasted 2 hours.

So what are we going to do next week? 

We are going to test Marcus idea of having the tiles hidden until the monsters are defeated. We will also tweak the heroes loot deck to give them more potions, weapons and other options. We will test how we can make traps more balanced and not too powerful in the late game and we will tweak the numbers on the tiles to try making the arc of the game more even.

Jonas Yzermans Falkheden