TTSR - some serious overcorrecting

Made some updates to Tonight the Stars Revolt based on the playtest a couple weeks ago.  Biggest thing is that combat is based on dice now instead of flat numbers.  Besides just generally making combat more unpredictable (and hopefully more exciting as a result), this is giving me another tool to work with for interesting options over the course of the game - the dice have a couple of "special" sides that normally don't do anything, but can have different effects depending on tech upgrades that you might get over the course of the game.  And of course the aliens will be able to take advantage of those as well, though that will likely be single-turn effects based on the AI cards rather than permanent upgrades like with player tech.

The other big change was making the aliens more aggressive.   In my test a couple of weeks ago they mostly just sat there and let the players shoot them, so the new rule I put in was that all alien ships move after each player turn, or attack if they are already in the same space as player ships.  And wow did this turn out to be too much.  I ran a solo test just now to see how the updates worked out, and the result with this one was that it felt like an overwhelming Zerg rush before the humans even had a chance to get ready.  Granted, this could be mitigated to some extent by letting players start with more ships on the board, and by making the board itself bigger so it takes longer for ships to reach each other (I probably will do this eventually, but it's a lower-priority change right now).  But even so, it felt like a lot of extra work to move every alien ship every turn, it made the AI cards feel a lot less important, and I didn't love the feeling when, through a combination of horde tactics and bad dice luck, the aliens had wiped out two out of three human fleets by the end of two rounds.  So I'm going to be scaling this one back for next time - maybe just automatic movement at the beginning of the aliens' turn, before revealing AI cards, rather than after every single player turn.  Hopefully that strikes the right balance.

But despite all that it still feels like this game is moving in the right direction overall.  I don't know if I'll have it ready for any of the usual design competitions when it's time for them (I'm already missing Cardboard Edison as we speak) but I'm feeling pretty good about what I might be bringing with me to PAX Unplugged next year.

ADDENDUM: and after another day of thinking about how to use those dice, I have now changed the system for tech upgrades, with some common ones that anyone can buy and also some unique ones for each player.  Hopefully they're relatively balanced against each other.  Now I need to update some of the AI cards like I mentioned earlier, and then we'll see how the next playtest goes... 

TTSR - first playtest

Had my first open playtest today for Tonight the Stars Revolt!  It went about as well as could be expected, by which I mean the players liked the theme and the overall structure of it, and gave me lots and lots and lots of feedback on things to improve for next time.  My biggest concern was the combat system, which is currently pretty flat and really was just a placeholder for initial testing anyway.  Players agreed that it wasn't great, gave me some suggestions for other games to look at for ideas, and that was as far as that went so it's pretty much all "TBD" at the moment.  My initial idea is to add randomization on top of the combat stats for the different ships, but I'll check out the other suggested games before I really get to work on anything.

Ooh, maybe cards for special maneuvers in combat.  And the aliens would get something similar, with more cards added or removed from that deck based on what players do.  Actually, maybe that idea should add onto (or completely replace?) the current AI system as a whole.  This will need further consideration...

Yeah, the enemy AI system, that was my other main focus.  In principle it worked well - they liked the setup with the three different decks of cards and with the players' actions determining which deck the aliens would draw from, and they used that as part of the strategizing on their turns, which was exactly one of my design goals for the game.  But it actually worked too well in that regard, and the aliens wound up being very passive in this playthrough, which is the opposite of how it should go (and very different from what I got in my last solo test, but then I was also playing it pretty differently from how the other people were today - which of course is part of why testing with a group is so important).  So whatever I do to revise the AI system, it will need to be a lot more aggressive overall.

Those are the main things I'll be focusing on for the next round(s) of revisions.  Other things that came up today were giving players more control over what tech upgrades they get (maybe even have whole tech trees?) and having more ways for them to interact meaningfully with each other.  I definitely do want to address both of those, but for right now they feel like lower priority compared to combat and enemy AI, so they're going to have to wait for a bit.

Hang on to tomorrow, because tonight...

 It's been a few more rounds of tinkering, solo testing, and tinkering some more, but I think I got Tonight the Stars Revolt! up to where I want it - ready to start testing with other people.  Solo testing with the current iteration felt suitably tense, with a lot of back-and-forth swings between the humans or the aliens having the upper hand, and that was very much how I want it to feel.  There's still a lot to figure out, most notably whether combat is going to be based on static numbers or if there will be any randomization, but that's what further testing is for.  At least now I got it up to where I can start doing that, maybe as soon as next weekend.

I'm back, and with even more lasers...

That hiatus over the last few months was good for me, but I am definitely back now.  Today I did my first barely-even-alpha solo test for a new board game, Tonight the Stars Revolt!  The premise of the game is that a number of human-occupied space stations around a trinary star system were being forced to gather energy from the stars for the benefit of their alien overlords, but now they are fighting back.  It's a co-op game with all of the players working together against the aliens, trying to destroy their mothership before the aliens have collected too much solar energy.  The goal is to have lots of high-speed space combat, multiple problems on the board that need to be addressed at any given time (kind of like X-Com, now that I think of it), and an interesting AI system for the aliens.  There's still a lot for me to figure out, but I think I'm at least on the right track here.  And I like what I have so far for the AI, that it uses three different decks, which are weighted toward different types of actions, and the decision of which deck to use depends on the player action to which it is responding.  Ideally I'd like to get it to a point where players can strategize around which deck they want the aliens to use (or avoid), and have that be a meaningful decision.

There's still a lot of work to do before this one is even ready for testing with other people, but it does already feel like there is a real game here (much more so than what I got with Scales).  And more importantly, it's gotten me excited to get working on games again.