Had my first test game today, me plus two other players. It went... okay. They liked the premise and the core loop, and quickly found some significant flaws in the current design (which is to be expected when it's the first draft, but still a bit disheartening). Biggest things I need to work on are giving players who aren't currently in the lead a reason to care about the investigation, strengthening the feeling of engine-building as you acquire more territory, and anything else I can do to increase the gameplay value of spreading your territory as opposed to picking a few lucrative territories and turtling there. The test players did like the "set collection" abilities that a few of the territories have (i.e. that they give you bonuses if you also have specific other territories), and we talked about having more of those and building in some overlap so it gives people a reason to go after each other's territory.
As far as the investigation, I have some ideas starting to come together about how to fix that problem, though I'm also noticing how they could lead to other potentially broken strategies, so I'll need to play around with that more. Maybe I'll have it ready for another playtest next month, maybe I'll alternate with Dolomball, I don't know. We'll find out in the next post, maybe?
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