Oops! Still Buggy, but in a bad way!

I definitely got the game running a lot smoother. In fact it was so smooth and intuitive the players tended to fall asleep. This is not good. The choices were obvious and a bit repetitive, which led to a boring game. I also balanced the building of the webs too much, resulting in a simple strategy which was obvious and completely bypassed the Push-Your-Luck aspect of building frail webs and hoping a storm doesn’t come too soon. Fortunately this is all fixable.

I believe the players should have more things they would like to do than the resources to do it. This results in tough choices and compromises, as well as strategies and tactics that shift during the game. To accomplish this, I re-worked the web building action cards and spider powers. The player will have to choose a smaller working hand of cards, with the option of changing things up later, at a cost of course. The players will also have a good idea what the opponents cards are, but not enough information to guess their possible moves.

I introduced a foreshadowing stage and a very simple programming stage to the turns to encourage bluffing and trying out-guess your opponent. The programming of two action cards will hopefully add just a little chaos to spice things up. The baby spiders which are added to your web will encourage more asymmetry. The different spider powers and bonuses will hopefully provide multiple paths to victory.

I am ready for a playtest of version #5 tonight. Hopefully the game stays on the rails, the latest overhaul was done fairly quickly. Fingers crossed.