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...
