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.