Hey, It actually worked!

Version number five worked better than expected. After only four official playtests, I appear to have a fully functional game which shows some promise. I know I’ve said this before with the fight night game, only to send it to the scrap pile a week or two later. I’ve also said this about my Nova Raiders game which is currently sitting on the shelf, and may just fade away into mediocrity. I really mean it this time. LOL

In the initial part of each turn, players move their spiders to a new position in their webs. This provides a hint to the other players as to what you may have planned. They then place two cards face down from their hands which will determine which actions each player will be performing. The cards are then revealed one at a time in turn order as the actions are performed. This provided for a great deal of bluffing and trying to second guess your opponent.

The drawing of the events tiles, such as bug strikes on the webs, swarms and storms provided a great push-your-luck experience. Players tended to build more frail webs which was due to the new and revised action cards. Players were constantly aware of the storm which could come and wipe away their frail webs before they had a chance to reinforce them.

The swarm event tile provided some real bug feasts which pushed players into an overabundant state, forcing them to expand their spider family whether they were ready or not. The extra overhead costs of the larger web and spider family were actually a detriment if your family grew too fast. The occasional famine was another thing to watch out for. A famine forced one player into a “Degrade” state where their web started to slowly degenerate. They were able to recover in a couple of turns, however, and were going like gangbusters soon enough.

This is all accomplished through a really tight energy economy which each player has to manage. Players try to keep things on an even keel, through feast and famine, where, either extreme, a surplus of energy or an energy crisis can force you into a precarious position. This seemed to work as expected and is one of the key elements of the game.

Limiting the players hands to five cards created some asymmetrical behavior, but it may have been a bit too much. It seemed too limiting in the last playtest. I’ll have to try different initial card counts to get the right balance. The introduction of new cards acquired in the market didn’t happen fast enough either. New cards were added to the discard pile like in a traditional deck building game. I will change this to adding the new cards to the player’s hand. This will allow for more tactical opportunities.

The different spider powers were cool and intuitive. Resetting only one spider power per “Home” action seemed to curtail any overpowered spider behaviors. I have to take a close look at the spider powers with a focus on tactical play. This has to be worked on next iteration. The spider powers were great fun, however, when they did work.

The action cards also need to be re-worked for more balanced tactical play. The building of the webs works well at this point, except for the slow rate of building them. Maybe the “Baiting” of the webs over an existing web is a bad idea. I’ll try adding the bait as a new web space, which will increase the web expansion rate. The webs seemed to be a bit too static in the last play test.

The new rule we introduced in the last play test, of discarding a card to gain one energy worked great. It was the magic bullet which stopped the energy economy from crashing. Another new rule regarding the swarm tile, also made the event tiles work much smoother. I just need to modify the mix of events slightly to make the game go a bit quicker.

The last game lasted about 2 hours. Given the game complexity, it ran too long and overstayed its welcome. I have to get the time closer to an hour or slightly over that. This can be accomplished, I’m sure.

The next task, is to work out the tactical play between the players so that there is a good amount of choices and strategies, and there isn’t one dominant strategy. I also need to look at the cost and valuation of all the cards, which will be a blend of both mathematical and perceived values. This is where I really have to roll up my sleeves and get to work. Wish me luck, I can use it.

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.

The last playtest was very constructive. The game flowed like an old engine wanting to start but sputtering to much to really get going. The problem turned out to be a wonkey turn rhythm. The heart of each turn is simultaneous play which seems to flow well, but each turn begins with a purchasing phase based on turn order. This disrupts the flow and takes the players right out of the immersive theme of the game. I yanked this part out and tossed it aside. In version #4, the purchasing is triggered individually with an action card, just like all the other actions. Turns should be simpler and more consistent now.

Another problem was the turn order token which is periodically passed from player to player. It was awkward, disruptive, and didn’t work well. I tossed that into the scrap bin as well. I’m working on a player order randomizer which can be implemented whenever required to resolve the order of playing actions. It will be pretty slick once I figure out exactly how to do it. Meanwhile, players can just draw colored tokens from a bag to determine play order.

The worst of the problems was the excessive randomness in the game. You could be doing everything right and still get beaten down by random events. There were actually four randomizing elements in the previous version. That’s enough to ruin anybody’s day.

Players drew random tiles from a bag to build their web, some of these provided much needed food, and others did nothing but expand the web. Draw too many of the latter and you’ll end up starving. This was not acceptable. The tile placement should be a decision point, not a punishment. I eliminated the bag, modified the way potential food points are implemented, and stacked the tiles in front of the players so they can choose which tiles to use. This even allowed me to implement a new headwind mechanism which I will describe later.

The second randomizer was the rotating action card market. This did nothing but handcuff the players. The economic constraints and the new card which allows you to buy or sell only one card is more than enough to mediate the market. Having a limited choice is not necessary. Having all the card types available (but in limited supplies) also helps promote asymmetric play and should make the game more fun.

The random draw bag containing the food and special events is definitely staying in the game. It adds loads of tension and a fun push-your-luck element to the game. This, along with the “Wiggle Die” which is occasionally used to determine if the bugs escape from your web, should provide just enough randomness in the game to make it fun and a little unpredictable.

The last playtesters wanted more player interaction. I had already planned on doing this, once I get the game flow right, so I have done this in the latest version. I’ve added a starting card which will enable every player to mess with an opponent’s web as well as a couple advanced cards which players can buy if they want to be more aggressive.

Finally, one last flaw reared its ugly head during the last playtest. There tends to be a slight snowball effect, when one player gains an advantage. A player could possibly gain a runaway lead and be un-stoppable. Rather than a blatant catch-up mechanism, which might seem contrived, I decided to implement a headwind mechanism to deal with this. In version #3, as each new spider was added to the web, an additional maintenance cost was un-covered, increasing the overhead costs of the web. I took this one step further and added an additional maintenance cost under the seven stacks of tiles in front of the player, This will hopefully slow down the run-away leader just enough to keep them in check.

The costing of items is currently seat-of-the-pants guessing. I plan on focusing on this once I get the game flow right. You can’t tune an engine until you get it running reasonably smooth, so the accurate costing of actions and other components might have to take a back seat for now.

I hope all these changes have the effect I desire, but that’s what testing is all about. Fingers crossed on version #4. You can check out the TTS prototype here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2554703613

Feel free to comment or drop me a line.

The game is coming along quite nicely. The first playtest didn’t go, down in flames as usual. The worst that happened was that one player got a bit bored, and the mechanics and components were much too fiddley. This is all fixable, especially with the great feedback I received.

I started by reducing the board size to encourage more engagement (less boredom) amongst the players. The action selection system evolved into a mechanism much like the one used in Concordia. I added the ability to play two cards if they interact with each other so it wouldn’t be a total rip off of the Concordia card mechanism.

Drawing the food tiles out of a bag turned into a neat push-your-luck mechanism. I originally planned on using a die, but threw the tiles into a bag because I didn’t know how many faces I would need. It turns out to be a pretty nifty push-your-luck mechanism if you draw them all out one at a time, then refill the bag when it’s empty. I added the “Wiggle” tile to simulate the potential bug escapes as well as the Swarm and Storm tiles which have drastic effects on game play. If the storm comes out early, it’s a free-for-all as players built their webs as fast as they can before the bag is replenished and the storm risk increases again with each tile pulled. This bag has also simplified all the awkwardness of the earlier implementation of all four of these mechanisms, random food selection, escaping bugs, periodic swarms of bugs, and the occasional storms that come along and damage your frail webs.

I’ve switched to simultaneous play with a turn marker which is just used to resolve conflicts. This will speed up the game quite a bit and provide a simple programming aspect to the game. (One of my favorite mechanisms.) I’ve also modified the game set-up and beefed up the child spider capabilities to encourage more asymmetrical play. The first couple of turns are similar but the play diverges quite quickly.

I’ve streamlined the play as much as I can and tried to incorporate all the complexity into the cards. This, I hope, will make make the game flow better, and be simpler to follow.

The next test will determine whether I have succeeded in working out the initial bugs. Even though I’ve run through it quite a few times myself, It’s hard to see all the potential problems that might arise with other players. Fingers crossed.

My next step will be to fine tune the player interaction once the webs start running up against each other. The basic gameplay needs to be fine tuned first, before we get into the nitty gritty.

If you want a peek, you can check out the Tabletop Simulator Mod Here:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2552783520