Designing Arachnid has been a long learning process. Just when I think I’ve made every possible mistake, I managed to make a few more. The most notable mistake was being blind to the flaws in my game. I also became too attached to one of the cool new mechanisms I came up with which resulted in me losing my objectivity. These major flaws were finally brought to light in a recent play test with other game designers. They were honest and forthright with their observations and I thank them for that, The consensus was that I have to put down the scalpel and bring out the axe, some things in this game have to go.
The concept was sound, the theme was good, but the mechanics were horrible. The worker placement and action selection system was very fiddly, causing players to constantly disconnect from the theme. The action queue, using marbles in an angled trough was a cool mechanism, but it was ill fitting and under-utilized for this game. It was the first thing I decided to remove. Everybody liked the marbles, and they will definitely be used in some other game, but not in this one.
The next thing to go was the awkward bug event deck, this will be replaced with a simple chit-pull system used in the earlier iterations of the game. The action queue was also used to trigger certain events in the game, but this tended to divert the players attention away from the core actions of the game. These actions will be integrated into the turn structure instead, and hopefully provide a smoother game flow.
Also gone, is the movement tracking system because it was fiddly, and players constantly forgot to reset their movement tracks during the opponent’s turn. I had noticed players disengaging from the game, so in the last iteration, players would have to rest on the other players turn by moving their action markers back one space. I thought this would keep the players engaged between tutns and focused on the game. The exact opposite happened. Players struggled to remember to reset their action token, causing them to disengage from the game more than before. I guess that didn’t work.
The player boards are gone, now that the action system is being reworked, and the auxiliary board with the hospital and nursery are no longer required. Eliminating all this excess junk gave the game a much cleaner look. The only items on the table are;
- The main board as well as tokens for webs, flies and Critters
- The spider university, a market where spiders acquire new action cards.
- The scenario board which controls each of the four scenarios.
- A bag of event tokens
- A deck of action cards which the players use to perform their various actions throughout the game.
- An Alpha Spider token used to indicate the first player each round
The actions the players perform are the same, but the old worker queue and placement system is replaced by a deck of cards. Players simply select an action from a hand of 6 cards. The movement is tracked by discarding cards face down from the hand. The finite amount of cards forces players to choose their actions wisely and move efficiently.
The critters move after all the players have performed an action and the bug events are determined by drawing a token from a bag whenever the players refresh their hands. The peril advances after each action round and hand refresh. This will hopefully make for a much more streamlined game. The next play-test will tell me if I hacked off too many parts of the game. It’s time to put the axe down and carry on.
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