Loose

Well, my suspicions were correct. Another playtest of My Little Vineyard with a "looser" set of rules did many things, all of which led to a better experience. Many of the rules changes weren't changes at all, but removals. Which is a good thing. Solving problems by subtraction instead of addition, or worse, addition of exceptions (as discussed a little bit later) is generally a bad place to be.

A lot of the complexity of rules centered around the removal of spoilage. During various parts of the game, most of your warehouse of supplies would be returned to the stock if you didn't use them "before winter came." Thematically, this made some amount of sense. But from a game play aspect, it really required way too much pre-planning for a player to think of, especially in a game using dice where you might not get the die roll you want. Not only did spoilage punish the player who rolled unlucky, or poorly selected a roll based on bad stategy, it resulted in a case where it "reset your world" thought various points in the game.

And that reset of the world turned out to be a problem. Early on in the design of the game, the desired reasoning was that the risk to make the better scoring wines was the potential that your supplies for it would be spoiled out of existence. As it turns out, just the fact that the higher scoring wines simply "cost more" is good enough. One of the more interesting statement on the last failed playtest which turned out to be wiser than it seemed at the time was that a game of this type should be a steamroller game...one where you start by building little things, and end with building big things. Spoilage never let you reach beyond the little stuff.

Another aspect that was changed to fit into this simpler world are the way the research books are implemented. And their change resulted in killing two birds with one stone. The research books now apply across the board to any barrel of wine you make, and you can purchase a research book at any time for yur turn for the cost of one die. Before, you only got a book when you produced a barrel...and it was only good for the type of wine you produced to earn it. Which resulted in some confusion as to when the book applied it's bonus (when you first picked it up) and tended to make player concentrate on a single wine type.

Now, with the one die pick for the book, it gives player something they can always do when there are no other actions available (the game was missing a fallback action when the was no other decent option available) as a beneficial side effect of a generalized bound-for-all book.

Anyway, I'm back to feeling good about the game again.

One other discussion about the game that we had was about defining different rounds to as doing something specific. For example, when you produce a barrel of wine, you can store it in your wine cellar, whee it will "ferment" and gain points at the end of every round, or simply ship it to score it's current value. The problem with barrels in your cellar is that they don't score for you unless you ship them out of your cellar which requires an additional action.

One of the things I liked about this system is that over the course of the four or five rounds you play, the first rounds are spent storing barrels, while the last rounds are spent shipping barrels. However, it is up to the player to decide whethat tipping point occurs. If players aren't careful, players will wind up at the end of the game with barrels stuck in their cellar scoring zero points.

Anyway, this is a choice OF THE PLAYER. There was some discussion of programming the rounds (round 1 and 2 are storing only rounds, 3 and 4 are shipping only rounds, etc). I believe that this is needless rules creep, and could prevent players from experiment with unusual strategies as they get better with the game, and falls into the category of "rules exceptions" which I don't like. Otherwise known as "the rules are this, except when..."

Chess has a few "rules exceptions" that bug the he'll out of me. Castling your king, and en passant, which are both rules that break piously discussed rules.

As it is, the game currently has one rule exception...on the first round of a season, every player must roll at least 5 (changing to 4) dice to add to the center pool. After that, it's one or more. I'm not a big fan of this exception, but it helps with first player advantage, and gets a lot of dice out in the middle of the table to start the round in a methodical manner. So, I can live with it.

I hope to have the next version of it up soon, but another, stranger project is sucking away at my time. Which I may or may not talk about depending on how that works out.

2 more playtest

Well, two more playtests for ESNA. I'm learning a bunch about the flow of the game (which moves very quick) and the balance (which is favored VERY heavily in the game's hand I think).

Game two actually was moving along swimmingly well, I managed to build a castle, went on a few quests (one involving going off and slaying a stinky elephant, two of them involving going of and returning an emissary from another Region, and one involving escorting a princess). Even managed to get up to Level 2, and created a few Level 2 creatures (Burrowing Gophers and Flying Kangaroos).

Unfortunately, on my next request for a quest, I needed to defend the castle in Brykestok from the invading Burrowing Livestock horde (well, two of them), and in since I was so busy transporting people around like the variant taxi driver I am, I never bothered to stop at the village to rest and reclaim HP, so I totally blame that on me. I was planning on doing that on the next Quest, but got hoodwinked into the castle defense.

Game three was a pretty sad state of affairs. I got beat up by two Undead Football Fans really badly; I couldn't even muster past their ridiculously slow speed rating of 3, to avoid their early hit.

Anyway...

Initially I figured that the player's total score would simply be whatever gold he has when he decides to retire (which at this point in the design cycle seems to be, don't even start adventuring; be a farmer). But gold is an interesting fungible resource; right now it is used to reclaim HP at the Village, and to advance levels at the Temple. Ultimately, I've determined that the race to simply retire with some amount of "vast sum" is kind of boring. It's pretty much at this point, "well, the game is getting too hard, might as well stop when I get a big payday."

And aside from that, the terraforming is kind of fun. And while it's sort of fun to run around the world, you can sort of do it on autopilot; I need some more decision points.

So, the player can build a Keep now, in which to retire in. The sheer impressive size of his Keep
will be the player's score.

At any point in the game, the player can determine his Keep location by selecting a Region without a building in it. At this point, the player can funnel money into his Keep.

But there's a trick to this. To increase the value of his Keep by one, he must pay the sum total of the levels of all the buildings that currently exist in the Kingdom. Early Keeps are easy to build while "building resources" are plentiful, but the money is tight early on, and you might want to spend money instead of HP (as I've learned quickly). Later on, while the Kingdom is functioning nicely, it's more expensive, but gives you an excuse to dump that extra cash into something nice like a media room or your Keep. So there's a bit of risk/reward decision making in the process of how and when to spend your cash. And that's typically good.

Along those same lines, I've been pondering the use of a new building, the Quarry, that will also let you spend money, this time to increase the Level Values of the Buildings. I don't want to increase the +1 Events too much (even though I will), and again, this will allow the player to make more decisions into the game with regards to money managements.

All is well in the world. Except for Fred, the Third, my latest Nameless Wanderer.


*****

Since there seems to be a little bit of interest in the game, I don't mind spending some time to put together an official, full functioning, completely pre-alpha ruleset for those who are really interested in getting the butts handed to them. Feel free to chime in.

From a design article standpoint, the game is doing what I thought it would do, and I really hate giving rote playtesting stories, as I'm much more interested in talking about design concepts, goals, and ways to achieve those goals. Since this game has pretty much fulfilled the "build the components as you go" requirement at this point, my need to present lengthy papers on personal dsign opinions has lessened for this!