Board Game – more play testing
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This week has consisted mostly of more tweaking and balancing of our game. On Tuesday we had a short meeting with Adam where he played our game and gave us some feedback. He enjoyed the game and thought we had a great base game that could be expanded in many different ways, like adding classes, shops/economy systems and more. He suggested that we should use the last weeks to try throwing lots of different systems and ideas into the game and see if anything worked. We thought about what Adam said but felt that the game still wasn’t balanced enough to start messing around with. As it was, the wizard won most of the games and the few times when the heroes won it felt like there was a lot of luck involved. But there was also the problem that the wizard was too weak in the start of the game. Often the heroes would explore almost half the board in the early turns without the wizard offering much resistance and then the game would slow down as the wizard finally started using the more powerful spells and monsters. The problem was mostly after the heroes had collected the three keys the fights to get to the tower was very hard and the wizard had a lot of spells to stop them. To fix the problem of the wizard being too weak at the start of the game we made it so that the wizard starts at 2 mana instead of 1 at the start of the game, this may not sound as much of a difference but thanks to the card Meditate, that is a 2 mana spell that lets the wizard increase the mana wheel by one, the wizard now can get to his more powerful mid and lategame spells quicker making the game more interesting from the start.
We made a couple of changes to try to balance the late game. The most important change was that we made it so that the heroes only need to find 2 of the 3 hidden keys in order to get into the wizards tower. This makes it so that the heroes don’t have to explore the entire board and therefore speeds up the time until they have the keys they need, now the wizard can’t just concentrate on protecting one of the keys because then the player can just find the other two keys and still be able to win. We have still only played a couple of games with this change so it’s not hundred percent sure it’s what we need but the early play tests look promising.
Another change is that we added one use potions to the loot deck that gives the heroes a one use bonus to their combat roll. This makes it so that the heroes have a bigger chance of winning the big late game fights where the wizard has collected large amounts of level four or five monsters in the same room.
Lastly we have balanced a lot of the spells and monsters in the wizards deck. On all the very powerful spells (Switcheroo, Whirlwind, Evil Laugh, Demon Invasion) we added the line “After you play this card, remove it from the game.” Otherwise these card could easily get out of hand when used together with Regrowth (4 mana, return a card from discard to your hand) or simply when the wizard deck runs out of cards and they get shuffled back in. We did not want to just remove Regrowth because sometimes the wizard is forced to discard cards in the early game and we want the wizard to be able to discard these really powerful cards that he can’t cast in the early game but still be able to use them later by returning them with Regrowth.
We also made some tweaks in mana costs and power level of some cards.
Next week we’ll hopefully be able to finish balancing the game and maybe test some wacky extra systems.
Jonas Yzermans Falkheden
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