Finally, I was able to incorporate some interesting decisions into the Arachnid game with version #10. Before this, the game was predictable, repetitive and things weren’t happening fast enough. The game and the theme promised loads of fun, but it just didn’t deliver. The players needed to make more interesting decisions and the players always wanted to do more. The new shifting action tableau solves both those problems.
Players get a hand of action cards and place them onto a constantly shifting action tableau which works like a conveyor. Each time a card is added to the left, the tableau shifts to the right and the last card is taken back into the hand. The cards themselves have three different, or modified, actions which trigger based on the card position in the tableau. As the cards progress down the tableau, the costs of the actions tend to increase, and, in some cases, the actions change.
The player can perform any or all of the actions available on the tableau as long as they can pay the associated costs. Instead of a card action, a player could place a movement token on the card to move a spider, or a consume token on a card to eat the bugs on their web. On the next turn, the skipped actions will shift to become more expensive.
The player is faced with some interesting decisions. The timing of when to introduce actions into the tableau and the necessity of sacrificing actions to consume bugs and move their spiders, makes for some interesting tactical planning. Performing multiple actions effectively is fun and changing your tactics because of another player’s interactions is maddening. (But still fun.)
The game flows much faster and is full of some tense moments. I’m just tweaking things now to get the bug economy working right and make the game flow smoother. Version #10 is ready for some real testing. Fingers crossed!
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