Back to the Drawing Board

Thursday night we had a grand old time doing our first three player playtest of our game, which, is tentatively named Donisi. Donisi is Latin for "vibrations" and describes the threads of memories that players draw from to build their decks. At point the game was called The Enders, but the story has changed enough from there that we made a switch recently. My firefighter and board game nerd neighbour came over to try out the game with Aaron and I and we learned (at least) four important lessons.

Lesson Number One - Aaron is an amazing artist
Poor Aaron has only had me buttering his biscuits lately about his artwork, but on Thursday he got to hear it from someone else. Don't get me wrong, I've tried to make it very clear to Aaron how amazing his work is, but he doesn't always believe me. When Brad, my neighbour, saw Aaron's stuff, he was so impressed. He was even more impressed when he found out this is the first time he's done anything like this. Aaron, you rock. Whether we have your final artwork in the game or not, it's been an amazing inspiration and grounding point as we've built this game together.

An example of Aaron's work - the stone shifter (a work in progress).

Lesson Number Two - changing one thing changes everything else
We've been working a lot on playing missions 2-4 and updating cards and spawns and boards and all of that. Well as we headed back to mission 1 for this playtest, we realized that everything else we changed made a big difference here. We had found missions 2-4 too easy and so we tweaked the spawn cards. Well, we might have gone overboard because mission 1 was really hard. We made it about three quarters of the way through the mission before the three of us were eliminated. If we hadn't purchased some specific cards (healing, defense) and got some lucky card draws, we would've died much sooner. I've since changed the spawn cards again and will just adjust the threat levels (when the spawn numbers increase) for missions 2-4 to balance things out.

Lesson Number Three - realism sets in
Playing a three player game allowed us to get a better sense of how many enemy pieces we would need on the board. It looks like we need somewhere in the range of 12-20. Well, since we've been building up and adding to our game, we've built up around 9 enemy types. That's between 100 and 200 pieces. For miniatures, that'd be crazy. Even for standees, that poses a storage and shipping problem. We think that we're going to settle on 6 enemies for the base game and save some of our other ideas for (hopeful) future expansions.

Lesson Number Four - it was a lot fun
Even though we're still in the thick of playtesting and designing the game, it was a lot of fun. Yes, we need to keep track of all the details and ideas that we want to change/implement in the game, but it was just a blast to sit down with the game and try to survive! Since you're working as a time and you really need to plan out what you're doing to maximize your killing power, you really need to communicate with your team (it reminded me of the conversations that take place during a game of Spirit Island, although, not quite that good). Even though someone's turn can take a little while, it didn't feel like it because you're helping them plan, spawning enemies, or buying new cards. We died in epic fashion and we had some spectacular moments. Brad performed a jump slam and killed 20 enemies in one move. On the turn where we would have died, I threw down a fire wall and blocked every attack. It was pretty sweet.

I don't know that any of you who read this find this interesting or not or if you just want me to get down to business playing games, but this reflective process is making me, I think, a better designer and gamer.