Progress! …sort of
The good news is that we played my horribly named board game again, and got much farther than we did before. The bad news is that it still needs a lot of work.
It’s not that bad. Where’s the fun if everything works out perfectly every time?
Five players, several hours, two six-packs, and lots of issues later and it is clear this game still needs major work. I’ll take it issue by issue. Anyone who was there and reads this is welcome to chime in if there’s anything I’ve omitted or misrepresented.
The chief problem concerns timing. Even ignoring the fact that the rules had to be taught to everyone beforehand, it took way too long to get into anything resembling a confrontation. Only two of us had optimized our starting territories for early growth, and that was one problem, but another issue was that there seems to be little incentive to play aggressively early on. The entire time we played, only one battle was fought, and that was a foolhardy attack launched by me in order to test the defensive power of the strongholds.
The fact that each player has ample opportunity to secure resources and defend them well coupled with the fact that the strongholds worked more or less as planned — one stronghold did not stop my invasion, but cost me dearly — means that after open conflict begins several hours into the game, you’re looking at many more hours until someone can claim victory. Not exactly what I had in mind.
It was all about building cities. It seems more or less every game will begin with a Catan-esque expansion and flag-planting spree before it gets down to conflict. While I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, I had hoped for a something more balanced.
Coin and the market system did not exactly play out as I had hoped. Fortunately, each of the five players had a different approach to it, so we got to see how it worked out in a number of scenarios. One player built two starting cities on a coin territory and found that this slowed early growth considerably — perhaps to a crippling degree. Two players built just one starting city on coin — one isolated in South Africa, and the other in the Middle East. Without access to other resources, the former found expansion more difficult than the latter. To be fair, the Middle East would have been rather difficult to defend later on. My capital was Central America, and so I expanded with the goal of city construction in mind and planned to acquire coin by selling surplus grain. This worked fairly well, as the ability to build a city each turn was useful — not as useful, however, as a similar strategy employed in East Asia. That player achieved the resources for rapid growth and easily expanded into Japan for coin afterward.
Obviously, we did not see enough bloodshed to truly test the value of the coin resource, but I agree with the comments made by my playtesters that it was not as useful as I had indicated. It remains to be seen whether a player can stockpile coin early and make up for it later, though it seems unlikely in the game as it stands now. I think I was the only player to export resources to the market, and the coin-rich but slow-growth player may have been the only one to buy anything from it.
Lastly, roads were a major letdown. No one built them but me, and I admit I did so to test their utility. I did not use them once.
It was suggested that the maximum number of cities per territory be decreased to two, and I agree. This is the first change. This change will speed up the pace of the game considerably and deal with a few of the problems I mentioned before. Most importantly, it will complicate the acquisition of the “city per turn” resource gathering. When we played, this could be done with a mere four territories. The need to seek out a second lumber source early on, and the lowered ceiling for development in general will force players into conflict earlier in the game.
It is also clear that three strongholds would constitute a defensive advantage so steep that any territory so ensconced would be nigh unassailable. Thankfully this problem is neatly solved by the two city limit as well. Not only would the defensive bonus be capped at two, but a player could be sacrificing precious initiative to construct the fortifications.
I think I shall allow unlimited road moves to encourage their use. I am not opposed to dropping them entirely, but I would like to try a few things first.
Unfortunately, the market and coin problems will not be so simply solved, but I’m going to try anyway. There is, I think, the danger of changing too much at once. While the market was under-utilized and coin was not as valuable as I’d like, the system functioned. People got resources and traded and built stuff. I think the focus for now should be on the pacing issues, so until that is cleared up, I want to avoid sweeping game mechanics alterations with regard to the market.
In the future, Great Britain and Japan will no longer be coin territories. This will increase the value of coin and encourage the use of the market.
I hope.
Conquest
I hope I didn’t just make a big mess.
This is something I’ve been thinking about since that first test. I was looking over the rules the other day and decided to address it now rather than wait until we play again because I foresaw this disaster before, we just didn’t play long enough to experience it.
I am talking about what to do with enemy infrastructure once you capture it.
Oh, right. I almost forgot. I am also talking about Settlers of World Domination.
What I wanted was for the player to have to make a difficult decision between converting their enemy’s stuff and just straight up wrecking it. The former choice obviously carries more long term benefits, but the latter allows a player to continue the offensive safe in the knowledge that the vanquished won’t be back to cause any more trouble. In the original version of the rules, the long-term plan involved waiting — three turns, to be precise. While this makes a kind of sense considering I intended the primary sacrifice for capturing cities to be initiative, it also makes things overly complicated. On a game board containing armies, cities, strongholds and roads, do the players really want to have to keep track of three turn counters as well? How about doing all that after throwing back a brew or two (or ten or whatever)? Of course not.
This revision allows the victorious player to conquer cities immediately, but ties up three armies. Armies in my game are somewhat more valuable than those in Risk, so I think this should do the trick as far as forcing a player to slow his or her assault if they want to conquer rather than destroy.
I also made a bunch of small changes and clarifications to the rules of engagement, by which I mean the protocols concerning cities and armies belonging to different players sitting in the same territory. I hope this doesn’t end up being a disaster, as some of it is a little complicated. However, I don’t expect it will actually come up in the majority of SoWD games.
I want players to ally with one another, and the current rules allow them to occupy the same territories, even intertwine their empires. More importantly, it provides the rules for what happens when the alliance breaks down and these complex situations require closure.
I hope the end result is more playable, and not a top-heavy disaster. Only time will tell.
Some of my best friends have superpowers
The first official session of Unhuman took place this last Saturday. Conspiracies were revealed, hands were chopped off, and sharp charcoal suits were ordered on a dead man’s credit card.
One thing I’ve learned while playing these games in the past is that it really slows things down when the group splits up for long periods, particularly when some players are less than seasoned. To compensate for this, the game began with the players waking up in the park in the middle of the night, drugged, poked, prodded, and ultimately dumped with hazy memories and superpowers. They soon learn that they’d lost an entire week during which many others around the world had developed similar gifts. Confused, isolated, and with no one else to trust, the gang wisely stuck together while they attempted to piece together who took them, and why.
The conspiracy hook was certainly something I tried to dangle, but I did not force the players down that road. What I attempted to do was structure the game in such a way that the players would have more freedom to pursue their own goals. Rather than lay out a specific goal, I tried to craft the world from a higher vantage point. I sketched out the general structure of the conspiracy they chose to unravel, but I was also prepared to react to several other stories they could have been in (teasing them in a newspaper and television news report).
How effective was it? I don’t know, to be honest. I think everyone had a good time. The issue with organizing a game on this level is the pacing. There’s no way I can plan out so much detail in advance, particularly considering the chances that the players will strike off on some unforeseen journey and skip all the material. I had to make a lot up on the fly. I’m out of practice, but I think I held my own.
However, the worst is likely behind us. As the group dynamic is established (chaotic neutral skulking and swashbuckling), and the short-term goals are set (revenge!), it becomes easier for me to predict where the cadre will go and the sorts of locations and NPCs I need to create. I can also mix in a little bit of those other dangling storylines to enhance, distract from, or complicate their central goals as needed.
I used Google Maps and Street View extensively. Unable to be sure what kinds of places the team would be going, it was damn near impossible to plan the sets out in advance. So when they tracked down someone who used to work for one of the conspiracy’s shell corporations only to find him very recently strangled by a mysterious black-clad man, I could show them the building’s exterior on my laptop screen. We even used the Street View image as a reference when they fought the assassin on the fire escape.
That was sweet. I wonder if any other enterprising gamers have used it for that purpose?
I expect I’ll find technology even more useful next time when the gang heads to New York City following their best lead to a Wall Street investment bank amidst the United Nations’ first summit on the global phenomenon. Stay tuned. Action, Mystery, and — one would expect — property destruction on an epic scale, when Unhuman continues.
Crippled Vulture Games 