Traps and dynamites!
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This Wednesday we sat down with our game and playtested, a lot. We tried different amounts of players, cards on the table and cards on the hand. Everything we tried worked pretty well but we finally decided that the game is best played with four of everything (4 players, 4 cards on the table and 4 cards on the hand). With five players it was harder to succeed in bluffing, since there are more players that have the ability to call you before it is your turn again. We knew early on that the optimal number of cards on the table was four. But it was not until after we tried playing with different amounts of cards that we decided; the game should always be played with four cards on the table. Having three cards on the table forced the players to bluff too much, at the same time you wouldn’t have to bluff if there were five cards on the table. The game sometimes ended really fast if someone started with three “good” cards, we added another starting card to decrease the chance of that happening. Until now we always started with three cards on the hand, still, the change didn’t prolong the game too much. Currently it can take a long time before someone wins the game, but that has nothing to do with the beginning of the game. This is our main problem right now; I will discuss this in the post above.
The “junk cards” in our game did not really have a purpose other than being a fast way of getting rid of cards. So we turned them into “trap cards”. You can still get rid of a trap card in the same fashion as a junk card, if a junk card is on the table, you may discard them both. The thing we added, (the “trappy” part) is if you put one of these below an 8 for example, and another player calls you, he/she just walked into your trap.
When a trap card is called, it is discarded, and the player who called it will have to take back their card, as their turn ends. This is where you get a dynamite card; I will talk about this soon. I would say that implementing trap cards added a new layer to the game, with trap cards you really benefit from making other players think that you bluff. With trap cards you also get a chance to figure out if another player has a correct card. We all wanted to add some sort of “super cards”, something that would give players an advantage if it was acquired or earned. I wanted to try something that would fortunately work pretty well and later turn into the “dynamite card”. We wanted something that didn’t change the game too much. We also wanted it to give players an opportunity to mess with each other, pulling the game closer to our aesthetics. The dynamite cards are not part of the main pile, they serve as “pickups” at the side. Each time someone calls your trap card, you get a dynamite card. You can during your turn use the dynamite to remove a card from the table; this also removes any card below it (placed by another player). A new card from the deck replaces the empty space on the table and player whose card is “blown up” has to pick up a new card. The benefit in the dynamite is the following:
Having a “playtesting day” was a great way to optimize the game we had, it becomes somewhat obvious what to implement or change while playing. Playtesting really is (in my experience) what perfects your game. But playtesting ourselves could only get us so far, you are always a bit blind when it comes to your own game, we would need to get feedback from other players. Luckily, in the following day, students would all gather and play each other’s games, just like the previous Thursday. The feedback we got there would help us pinpoint the remaining problems we needed to fix in our game. |
