Jones Brood Playtest

[Mike]

Spectacular! I will address all of this shortly, but first thing:

Quick Start rules. I'm totally on board with: here's the 5 minute overview... don't worry about the details--you'll learn as you go. So my question to you is:

What has to go in that 5-minute quick start?

I've done a couple of these, and I always miss something crucial, so I'm trying to sort it out and get a good fast teaching outline.

[Mike]

[Mike]

Also, if people are okay with it, we could use:

Dates of each playtest
Names of everyone who played (as they would like their name to appear in our list of playtesters)
Which gods/heroes you used
Final scores

[Kyle]

[Mike]

Oh yeah, and game time for 12 rounds.

90 minutes is friggin solid for a teaching game. As we build experience and quit mucking with the rules so much, we're thinking it's going to hit about 60-75 minutes for a 3-player game, which is where we want it. But for occasional players and newbies, 30 minutes per hero would make us happy.

[FlameBlade]

From what I understand from game design is, if the question was "Can I do this?" The answer is most likely yes. Like portal thing. Pillar of Heavens on goal areas? All fair game.

[Kyle]

[Tahlvin]

Didn't want to start a whole new thread, so I'll just add my thoughts to this one, based on last night's play through the most recently revised set of rules.

Perhaps it's many of the tweaks that you made over the past few days based on feedback at GenCon, but I thought it was a very strong game. I had a blast playing it. I'm sure it helped that I was playing with a group where everyone was excited about it. And it helped to be playing with the designers. But heck, it was my first time playing it (and Zen's as well, I believe), and it was easy enough for me to pick it up. Of course, I had watched a few partial games, so I wasn't starting completely cold.

There were a few small tweaks that could still stand to be made. That card that allowed me to force a fumble from two hexes away seemed pretty powerful. Perhaps it needs to be either limited in use or more expensive to use. If it's limited use, I wouldn't want it to be something you use once, somebody blocks it, and it's gone; so either you have to discard it on a successful use, or it's good until the end of the turn where it was activated. Or if you increase the cost to use it, the cost to counter it should also increase. If it costs 2 AP to use it, but it can be countered by 1 AP, that's not really a "gift" for your hero. But if it costs you 2 AP to use it, and it will cost the target 2 AP to defend against it, that evens it out a bit. If the target doesn't have enough AP to defend, they can't. If you have enough AP to use it twice, you can continue to do like you do now (I force fumble, they defend, I force fumble again and they cannot defend because they've used their one defense per turn). Those are some small tweaks that might help even it out a little bit. On the flip side of that, the card that Zen had, which said that nobody could defend against him but he couldn't defend against anyone either, that seemed like a nice balanced card (it gave a boon but had a cost).

I'd love to play again sometime with a different hero/god. I know you said Hera/Achilles was the most powerful, but it seemed to me that the rest of you were plenty powerful, so I didn't feel like I was playing anything special. I'd like to see it from the other perspective and see if that's really the case. I had plenty of cool stuff I could do, but you guys were doing just as much, and you seemed to be doing much more to affect the terrain than what I could do.

Overall, I had a blast! Thanks for letting me play! Can't wait to play it again sometime!

[Zen]

As with Tahlvin, the game Saturday night was also my first game. I was coming at the game totally cold other than a few glances at the threads here on the boards. I hadn't really even read the materials that much.

I also found the game very easy to grasp and a lot of fun to play.

Thoughts I had about ways the game could be improved/things we talked about during the game:

1. AP = Ambrosia Potions - you could have a cute little graphical symbol with a potion bottle and put however many of them are needed for the action on the card. You still have an easy acronym that parses to "Action Points" in the long run as well, but it has a bit more Godliness.

2. Not having been involved in the development process, I expect you've discussed this concept and decided against it, but I'm going to toss out this suggestion anyway. Have you considered having contested combat randomly determined? Let me explain further: If you did this, it would mean changing the attack rules to one of each type of attack per round instead of one defense per round. Here is my suggestion for how it would work:

1. The active god declares an attack (any attack).
2. The defending god chooses to defend or not to defend.
3. Regardless, the attack is resolved by computing die rolls as follows:
Attacker: AP * (AP + D6 - HexCost)
Defender: AP * (AP + D6 - HexCost)

if Attacker > Defender, Attacker wins.

In both cases the hex cost is for the hex of the defender. Since you are subtracting hex cost, if you are in favored terrain, it helps you and if you are in non-favored terrain, it hurts you. So attacking Poseidon in water gives him an advantage and attacking Hera in the mountains gives her an advantage.

Note that it is multiplied by the AP spent, so if the defender chooses not to defend, there is no need to roll... unless the attacker is in very bad terrain... which is an issue. If you are attacking, say, non-favored terrain with three sheep, it would make it possible to end up getting a negative value on the roll. So it could be that Hex Cost only comes into play if the attack is contested, since the original concept I had was that if the defender chose not to defend, no roll was needed...

This also suggests an option for forced fumbles: random determination of where it lands if it's a contested attack. If you had a spinner, or even used a six-sided die and assigned a number to each of the directions using one of the hexes on the map, you could say that a contested fumble results in the ball popping out in a random direction, re-roll/spin if it lands in an illegal spot like a pillar. This gives a random chance that the ball could come to the attacker. On a non-contested fumble, the rules would stay the same. The god chooses where the ball goes and can't take possession of it unless they have a card that says they can. Of course, if they have such a card, that lets them take possession on a contested fumble as well.

The cards that alter attack parameters could also give +1 to attack sometimes...

I realize that this probably overly complicates the rules, so it isn't the type of thing you'd want to add in, since you're trying to streamline... it was just a thought while showering...