Nerd Pride Radio

Hey folks! Anyone interested in helping us test out Godball again? I'm thinking Thursday evening around 9:30 EDT or so. Even if you haven't played before, we're working on practicing our teaching, too, so we would love to have you!

Maybe from me.

Just kidding! Due to the inclement weather...we're playing tonight! TONIGHT! YAY!

Just kidding. We try again tomorrow!

In the meantime, here's a game that the original, original form of Godball was like! (It was...um...not good....neither is the 1978 Battlestar Galactica.)

3 Player Playtest: Flame (Poseidon), Me (Aphrodite), Mike (Athena)
DMDarcs observing.

Final score 2-2-2

This game, to me, highlighted how much farther we have to go before we are actually ready to publish or pitch anything. Not because it was a bad game, nor because I want to make sweeping changes, but because of the balance to card sets that need to happen to make every hand feel meaningful to the player playing it. I learned some new lenses to evaluate the cards through, for sure. Also, I allowed myself last night to be frustrated by the amount of work left to do in development, and that's okay. Now it's time to get back to work.

Positives: 3 players remains the optimal player count, with 4 players coming in 2nd and 2 players 3rd. Terrain was out and about, but it did not feel crowded like sometimes. Athena was great, and Poseidon seemed to be getting much closer to his final form.

Positive: Hero/Beast, Object, Terrain - This was a great insight from Mike and it's created awesome spaces to play in, and the simplification allows for some new and interesting combinations to happen. (See, moving labyrinth)

Experience Issues: Flame said that he had VERY (possibly overly) situational cards. I managed to draw 9 of Aphrodite's 13 gifts, which also contained a bunch of situational cards. Situational cards are not bad, in and of themselves, but too many of them can lead to dead hands, and dead hands aren't fun to play.

Question this raises: Is this just an anomaly and I got hosed? Or a lack of experience in knowing when to discard 2 cards to cycle through my hand? Or a deeper issue? I probably held onto my hands too long before discarding and drawing 2. However, I had 2 hands in a row where I discarded and drew 2. Probability states this could happen, however, it would be my preference as a designer that this doesn't happen to a player.

Randomness Issue: Decks are going to swing, and this is what we want. However, I do feel that every game with a particular god feels like you are playing that particular god. This will take more effort in the deck construction as we learn the play spaces more.

Rule Issue: Dive - This needs to be cleaned up and rewritten so its a little clearer.

Card Tweaks: There are issues on some cards still. Mostly in edge cases. For example, if Galatea becomes a statue on Mt. Olympus...how does that work? We need to rewrite her card a little further to make it more clear that she can be force fumbled as a statue.

First of all. This is probably the first game after so many rules tweaks and streamlining.

I had tons of fun! Despite minor issues, the game felt much more intuitive, and seems like it could be grasped easily. I think that playtest let us see tweaks that is needed for GP. Also, it probably informs some of design...to prevent from hands being too dead.

It's going to be hard, but I think it's very close to being ready for expansion of playtests to a little more wider audience.

Agreed on all counts.

From earlier discussion:

Game seems to work best in the 2-4 player range. Getting 5-6 to work requires a level of trial and error playtesting that I don't think we're capable of yet. Unless things change, we maybe have to start reconciling ourselves to the idea of a 2-4 player base game.

The motivation for the card-tweaking is that some of the cards are rather situational. You hold on to them, because they'd be awesome if the proper situation arose, but often you hold on to it for way too long and never have use for it. A couple of those and you've severely limited your hand for most of the game. I think that encourages experienced players to just ditch those cards early

The best solution on the table is to ensure that most cards have some measure of obvious and more immediate usefulness. For example, a gift that provides a modest benefit all the time, and then a more significant benefit that is either very situational and/or requires a discard after the big effect. Alternately, cards with a simple /or/ statement--you can play it for a very powerful but situational advantage, /or/ you can play it for some minor effect that is always useful.

The idea is that we want people to always feel like they have something they can do. Foregoing your GP to discard 2 cards should be a very rare event.

We talked about more, but that was most important.

Sorry if I've repeated what you guys already said.

Incidentally, I talked to my gaming crew about last night's playtest, and I think I sold then on the idea, and would need to test with them soon.

Mike: I think that's an accurate summary of what we talked about. And reminded me that we need to add a brief blurb that explains what the 'symbol' "/or/" means on our cards. We use it with specific purpose and need to make sure that others understand that purpose. (Okay, it's in case they decide to look it up.)

Flame: That's awesome and wonderful, thank you. What do you think needs to be done before that playtest? (And how long do you think we have to do it?)

Rulebook updates:

Added "/or/" language.

Cleaned up "Dive". It's a little better.

Cleaned up "Bat Away". Not sure I helped it all that much.

Cleaned up a couple of other things, too, but only little things.

Also, if we're thinking of changing this to 2-4 players, we should strongly consider redoing the map. I have an idea of how to do this, but I need to sketch it out.

We are currently learning how to play CO2. So maybe a couple of months.

Flame: Cool, that will give us some time.

Mike: I can't do it. Everything that I come up with doesn't look natural. I'm not saying that a big hexagon looks natural, either, but it does feel more like we just found a big open space and laid some hexes down on it as opposed to creating odd shaped playing fields to make it fair for 2 or 4 players. I'm leaning heavily toward leaving it a hex, and then when we do a team expansion, creating a field shape for 2 teams playing each other, and a field shape for 3 teams.

Let me throw in a caveat. There is a deaf board gaming convention in Austin, TX (hi, Kyle) June 7 through 9.

I am still thinking about going, but haven't decided.

Worse, that's my wife's birthday weekend.

Um... Unless you have a really amazing weekend planned before or after, I think I know what you should do this year.