Minsterpool comes home

So, the results are in. Minsterpool comes in 3rd place of the GCOM Game Design Competition, scoring 12 points out of a possible 15. 1st and 2nd place went to games that were being demo'ed by the designers, so Minsterpool winds up being the highest scored game that was presented by a 2nd party.

One of the nice things is that I got a lot more feedback than I was expecting (with apparently more to come when the game actually show up back at home). Plus, numerous suggestions on making the game better. So, my hat's are off to the GCOM people!

Looks like I'll be re-writing up a new set of rules soon based on these suggestions. It appears that the major flaw in the game was the way I implemented the turn order, which is basically: the player with the highest score goes first, and then everyone takes their turn going arund the table. Since the player who goes first is at a disadvantage, this helps even the game a bit by quietly slowly down the leader. However, this really winds up screwing the player who sits directly to the left of him (the person who goes second).

So, in the next pass, I'll be doing a bidding system for turn order. You want the advantage to go last, you better pay for it!

Of second concern, is the ability to play two cards on a turn, which puts you at a severe disadvantage in most circumstances.Which in reality, isn't that many circustances at all. One of the suggested fixes for this, and it's a good one, is to have some cards do double duty. This would get rid of the whole "play two card" option, which would clean that part of the rules a lot.