TtSR playtest report

Made some more changes over the past week, had a playtest today, and both players were clamoring for more at the end.  Comments included "I was getting into it and I was a little sad at how quickly it ended - I could have gladly played more rounds" and "there were many moments in this game where I felt super smart, and like I was really a great commander."  So I think I've got the core of it figured out pretty well.  The players had amazing luck with the dice and the AI cards, which helped, but even with that they were doing a lot of careful planning and strategizing to maximize their advantage.  Overall they felt like the challenge level was good.

Next big challenge for me - figuring out a more satisfying and bossfighty way to destroy the mothership rather than just getting lucky on a really good attack roll.  I'm sure I'll figure that out sooner or later... 

Successful streamlining

I think I got TtSR figured out - the harvesters move automatically after every player turn like before (though with a simpler movement path with fewer decision points), and the fighters start in the middle of the board but don't get automatic moves unless a player ends their turn in an adjacent space.

I did a solo test today with this, plus a simplified decision tree for which AI deck to draw from for the aliens, plus tech advancement being based on shooting down alien ships instead of spending actions and energy (these were both suggestions from players in last week's test game).  To really stress test it, I used all five player factions, which I haven't done before.  And it worked.  There was a lot less work at the end of each player turn, but the aliens still felt threatening since they were hovering in the middle of the board instead of all the way back by the mothership.  There were tough decisions around what "players" should do at different times because addressing one threat would mean letting another one go, and around what order the players should go in so the aliens wouldn't be playing a long string of Attack cards at the end of the round (which hurt a lot when it did happen).  And there were interesting opportunities to strategize around the new rules, like when I was able to pull a lone fighter into a ridiculous trap.  The game ended with a human victory after four full rounds, which felt like enough.  During that time there were enough ups and downs that it felt tense more often than not and the victory felt well earned.  So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the core structure of the game now.

I still have a lot of fine tuning to do though.  Biggest things that stood out to me today were that I don't love the current rule for how the mothership defends itself from attacks, and I need to change how random direction of movement gets decided (at least rearranging the icons on the board that I'm currently using, but maybe I'll even think of something better than that).  Probably also going to want to make some more tweaks to the tech options.  And I'll see what else pops out at me with further testing with other people.  But for now I think I'm in a good place to commit to making a physical copy, as soon as I update the image files to match what I did today.  PAXU is only 14½ weeks away...

Back in action (kind of)

Finally got Tonight the Stars Revolt in shape for another public playtest, after several rounds of solo testing and various revisions coming off of that.  Overall reaction was positive, but I couldn't get into the specifics as much as I wanted because all of the between-turn maintenance slowed it down and we only got through two full rounds of play.  So that's definitely one thing for me to work on next, is finding ways to streamline that without losing the sense of threat.  The other big challenge, also connected with between-turn maintenance, is that the action economy is pretty lopsided and it forces the players to be on defense pretty much constantly, while the theme of the game (and also the victory condition) is really crying out for them to be on offense more.

Something that I noticed in solo testing, and which also came up in today's test, is that there are a lot of cool tech upgrades and never enough time to get more than one or maybe two of them.  One of the players had a cool idea though - upgrades are earned by shooting down alien ships instead of by spending energy and action points.  I love this idea, I think it'll work well to reduce some of those opportunity costs and actually allow the players to be more aggressive.  It feels a little more video gamey, but I'm okay with that; there's no attempt at even faux-realism in this game.  Now I just need to work out the details of how to implement it.

And then maybe I can get one more test in if I move quickly on this, and then it's time to commit it to hard copy for Unpub at PAXU...