Todays session was about establishing a system till our play test on Thursday.
Our basic idea is that 4 players are to find treasure in a dungeon with a monster in it, the fifth player. The monster is only visable every fourth round and when he/she kills a player, rest of the time the players are unaware of it’s movement.
We feelt that the movement system in this sort of game would be the most important, thus starting with it. Also we knew the gameboard was going to be a big part of the game and how its balanced, so starting with the gameboard and movement was a quite obvious choice.
The gameboard is going to need alot more iteration aswell as the movement, but i think we got a good grasp on how this game is going to play.
Both the players and the monster moves equal amount of squares as a D6 die shows. The players does not have to move the full amount but have to move a minimum of 1 square.
Game 1 – First Iteration
This is our first iteration on the gameboard, The gray squares indicates tiles you move on. The white squares are rooms where you are to search for treasures. The white lines are shortcut pathways that players can take to quicker get to places.
To not make the movement of the monster to obvious we numbered the squares so that the monster player could write down his movement instead of having a avatar representing it at all times.
We decided that 20 turns would be enough to test one round of the game. It took about 30 minutes to play.
This board was way to small, the restriction in movement except for the outer ring it was way to limited and very predictable, for both the monster and the players. The monster had a huge advantage becuse of this and killed a player almost every turn. So we only needed one play to know that this board was not going to work.
Game 2 – New board
We made a new board that was not symetrical. We also more than doubled the amount of tiles. We used the same rules as the first time we played.
We did not make any secret paths this time, we thought if they where needed we could add them later.
We was just trying the board with the most simplest mechanics which was movement.
This iteration was WAY better then the first one, the movements became much more unpredictable and random which was great. It happend alot that players ran into the monster thus killing them and it was great fun. When we died we respawned without penalties just to try the movement as much as possible.
The deaths was distributed between the round very even, round 2, 6, 12, and 19 so almost every sixth round there was a death.
Game 3 – you may not move through players.
So in the third game we added a little twist we thought could work very well in the system, and this was that players where not to move through eachother. Meaning that if a player blocks a pathway other players cant move past him and gets stuck.
we used the same board that we made for game 2 with no iteration.
This added a whole new dynamic to the game, now you could block players to go paths that the monster could potential be on.
We tried to play as it would if they game had all its components, staying in rooms and search for treasure to simulate a more accurate representation of the game.
We ecountered alot of cases where a player would block another to force him down another path and in some of the cases getting killed by the monster.
Deaths in this round: round 8, 10, 11, 20. Not so spread out this time but still counted up to four kills as the previous game.
Game 4 – More of the same
We tried to play the game again with the same set of rules as before, in this round we ended up with 7 kills on the players and much more concetrated, even there was two kills in the same round.
We dont know yet how the game exactly will play out when we add the treasure and searching system, we also think that some sort of action cards is going to be needed for the players to be more versitile. But this is stuff that we are going to test at a later stage, now we are focusing to get the movement just right.
Mikael Karlsson Gamedesign 