Had a Grand Expedition playtest yesterday with the fine folks at Break My Game. First impression was good, people liked the theme and the overall idea of the game, but the same problem reared its head about things moving too slowly (which then trickles down to some other problems that reduce the fun). We talked about ways I can improve this, and it looks like what it's going to take is some major changes to some core elements of gameplay. Today I started thinking through what that might look like while still at least keeping the basic foundation. The main thing is the board layout. The way the game has been so far, there's a large blank map with one corner that's filled in at the start, it's divided into "zones" based on how far they are from home base, terrain is randomly determined as players explore (weighted to produce larger areas of the same terrain instead of being 100% random from one space to the next), and players pay a variable movement cost for each hex depending on the type of terrain. The playtesters liked the weighted randomness of the terrain, but not the variable move cost, or having little information with which to make meaningful decisions as they explored, or the way that more distant zones made some adversaries more difficult but didn't actually feel cooler, or the hassle of spending several turns just walking back to town when you're injured while in bad terrain that's halfway across the board. And while I know that no one person's opinion should be taken as gospel, the things they pointed out were things that I had worried about before too, though never articulated quite as well. So with that confirmed, here's the new system that exists in my mind but not yet on paper:
Instead of being one big hex grid, the board is now divided into several adjacent sections, each one 5 hexes in diameter; the game term "Zone" now refers to these different sections. Each Zone is randomly assigned to a specific terrain type, and while terrain is still random, it's now weighted based on the Zone it's in rather than wherever the player is coming from (so if you specifically want to explore some mountains, you know that you'll have the best odds in the Zone that has a mountain in the center hex). Exploration cards, rather than being in one deck with different cards limited to different terrain, will now be split into separate decks for each terrain type (based on the Zone rather than the individual tile - maybe dwarves usually live in hills or mountains, but if you happen to get a swamp tile in the middle of a mountain Zone then there could still be dwarves there). Movement cost will be flat, based on number of hexes regardless of terrain (maybe variable depending on whether or not you are exploring any new territory this turn). To make terrain still matter, each terrain type will have a different bonus effect if you walk through that hex without finding anything there. And to fit this with my original concern about not wanting the board to get too crowded, I'm thinking that each turn spent exploring will still only yield one Exploration card, regardless of how many hexes you've explored that turn - you draw a card, find whatever you find, choose which hex it belongs to, and then get the bonus effects for the other "empty" hexes.
Assuming I stick with this, it means a lot of work rewriting the Exploration cards, as well as a lot of the magic items and player abilities, so that everything makes sense under the new system. I also don't know if Legends will even still be a thing or not. So I think the first step from here is to figure out how to do just enough of the work for a "proof of concept" test, see how I like it, and go from there. No idea how long this is going to take, but I do feel confident that I'm going to have a much better game whenever I finally do come out the other side.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more, I realized that I might end up changing the victory condition too. With Zones now being clusters of similar terrain and their own individual Exploration decks, I could say that each Zone has a "Legendary" something or other (still working on a name that is sufficiently flexible and not lame), which would be an Exploration card with some extras on it to make it feel especially cool, and then instead of competing for Fame points the players could instead be competing to collect a target number of Legendary cards. I'm not sure yet how I feel about this, although one thing that occurs to me is that it will probably feel like less of a slog compared to the current experience of "after three turns I have collected this much Fame, I still need this much more to win the game." Less swingy too, since I've seen how it can go that someone who has one or two turns where they get lucky with the cards can build up a huge lead on the scoreboard. Still going to need to put a lot of thought into this, and probably test the board setup change with and without this other change.
