Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Too much pinging

I am in the final furious flurry of design for Camp Nightmare before I arrange to have art made for it.  Playtesting is going really well and people are enjoying the game but I am still fussing away at the fine details.  One of the things I am trying to sort out is how ongoing effects should work.  Two examples of the previous design:

Hail

At the start of each turn the active player discards 1 card.

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Windy

At the start of each turn the active player trashes all of their Equipment.  They may pay 1 Energy to ignore this effect.

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I like both of these cards thematically.  Hail falls down randomly breaking your stuff, and wind tries to blow all of your gear away so you have to spend time and energy tying everything down to keep it from vanishing.

The trouble with these effects is that people kept on forgetting about them and when they did remember there was a lot of deliberation over what to do.  Hail in particular slowed the game down brutally as every turn someone had to agonize over which card to discard.  Usually people just paid the Energy for Windy so it wasn't as hard on processing power but there were still constant issues with forgetting that it existed.

There are plenty of cards that change the game but which don't cause analysis paralysis like these:

Eerie Stillness

Lose 1 Fun any time a player Rummages.

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Downpour

No one may take the Start Fire Action.

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In both cases these cards just lock out a particular Action, which doesn't require constant decisions and is fairly easy to process every round.  Nothing needs to change so forgetting about it is usually not an issue.

My new strategy for Hail and Windy is to try to remove the necessity to process them on every single turn.  I want people to figure out what effect they will have and to have to deal with them only a limited number of times.  Currently they look like this:

Hail

At the start of each turn if the active player has 5 or more cards they discard 3 cards.

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Windy

Players must pay 1 Energy each time they put a piece of Equipment into play.

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Both of these effects are strategically different but thematically similar to their predecessors.  Hail is absolutely crippling if you have a ton of cards but when it drops into play it will generally only need to be processed once.  It is unlikely people will choose Hail if they have gigantic mitts full of cards, after all.  Also it is noteworthy that the new version pushes people to have small hand sizes to avoid the effect while the old one rewarded large hand sizes to give maximum selection.

Windy is nice in that you probably only have to check it out once or twice during a cycle and once you get your Equipment down you can bring it out without having to check on it constantly.  You still need to keep it in mind but the constant need to check each turn if a piece of Equipment is blowing up or not is unnecessary.

In both cases I feel like I have reduced the maintenance requirement of the cards without making them strategically uninteresting.  Hail is actually more interesting now I think, while the new version of Windy is a little less so.  However, the new version of Windy is *much* clearer and easily for new players to understand so that is a big plus.

I really need to get this stuff nailed down hard, and soon.  I don't want to be going back to the drawing board in terms of art just because I can't stop iterating on my design, after all.

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