Skye Frontier - 4p playtest

 I got a chance to play a 4p game of Skye Frontier this afternoon with Rick, Aaron, and a new arrival at my playtest group, Eric. Other than some technical difficulties right at the start, I think it went fairly well...

The game only took about an hour, but I think we got enough stuff done. I audibled during the game to awarding N coins for completing an area of size N (instead of N-2), which spend the game up a little bit -- with that change I should probably add a few coins to the supply (like 18-20 coins per player rather than 15/player). Also, my current rules say that the game ends at the end of a turn when the coin supply runs out, but it seemed clear that we should finish out the round.

We used the tweaks I decided on after last week's 2-player test:

• Scrolls cost 1 of each cube (rather than 1 of any cube), and are worth 1x value (2x if in a completed area)
• Start with 1 of each cube (rather than producing in each area, which amounts to about 2 of each cube or so)

Those seemed to work OK, and seemed to have the expected effect - more people were storing tiles, and the Build action being used more.

Here are some notes from this session:

• Barrel icons should be worth something extra, since there aren't as many things that score for them. Conveniently, they have a coin icon incorporated into them, so maybe I could just make them worth 1vp at game end
• OR... one (or two) of my players suggested just removing the barrels, making fewer total icons, and making it a little bit easier to get the other icons you're after
• We used 4 each score tiles, scroll tiles, and regular tiles to explore. I had considered scaling the regular tiles by using N+1, so no matter what all players would be choosing from 2 or 3 of them every time. I think I might try that next time. As for score and scroll tiles, I might try reducing those to 3 next time
• I haven't ever used it, but technically there's a rule in the rules doc that say s you can draw a scroll tile off the deck if you don't like what you see, but I don't like that, so I'll be deleting that rule
• As mentioned above, I think I'll award N points for completing an area of size N (rather than N-2). Originally I wanted to disincentivize making a bunch of small size-2 areas, but I'm not sure that's necessary or worth the extra rule
• Also as mentioned above, I think we should play out the round after the game end triggers so players get an equal number of turns

The players all said they did enjoy the game, so maybe it's time to start looking for a re-skin or re-theme. Since I've been calling it "Skye Frontier," it's made me think of a game about airships and flying islands, with something of a steampunk vibe, but I don't have anything specific in mind. One of my players had some good, unusual ideas, which I'll list here so I can find them later:

• The scrolls suggest towns or factories that need specific resources. Could be like space colonies or factories.
• Or make it ecosystem themed - icons are prey, scrolls are predators, trading is migrating or something
• Ok this might run into appropriation issues but: volcano island culture, scrolls are temples, icons are villages and farms, trading is sacrificing to the volcano (or boats represent escaping/expeditions to another island?)
• A little more abstract could be restaurant manager themed: castle represents your restaurant, trading is delivering food, icons are food suppliers (butchers, farms, fishers, specialties like truffles), and scrolls are restaurant reviewers. "Exploring" is connecting with new suppliers, terrain could be growing regions OR cuisine styles

It was good to have a full test, to get a full table of testers, and to have a game go over decently well!

My kingdom for a playtest! Partial plays of Division of Labor and Skye Frontier

 I have been missing out on playtesting lately, as every week for the last month I have had to cancel for one reason or another. So I was very excited to get a 3-player test of not one, but two of my games last Sunday. Well, they were each only partial plays, but it was still a lot better than nothing!

Division of Labor

First up was Division of Labor, which is the working title I'm using for the I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement game. The last time I playtested anything, Rick and I gave this idea a first run, and that basically led me to believe the mechanism had some potential, but the game had all kinds of issues. I addressed some of those and was excited to give the 2nd draft a go. At this point I don't really have the endgame figured out, so Rick, Andy, and I just played 1 round and then had some discussion (also, at that point, TTS started acting funny anyway). The biggest idea that came out of that session is that while the main mechanism did work, it didn't feel much like I-Cut-You-Choose. In addition, it felt frustratingly difficult (in a bad way) to do some of the things you wanted to do.

For the next iteration, I will make some tweaks and changes, the most important of which address the above issues. It might be OK if the game doesn't FEEL like I-Cut-You-Choose... I could just stop billing it like that and it could just be a worker placement game with procedurally generated spaces or something. But I do like the idea of "I-Cut-You-Choose Worker Placement," enough to give it at least 1 more shot. I think a mistake that led to this failing has to do with the hasty board I made in order to test the game. I had players each splitting a bunch of cubes and placing them in a central location, and as they were used, they got distributed outward. As a result, there were basically far too many options when placing your workers - when splitting cubes it didn't fee like you were making an important split that would affect another player. 

To make the choices feel a bit more like ICYC, I will try reducing the instances of splits. Instead of each player splitting 8 cubes at the top of each round, I'll just have 1 player split 8 cubes, then the next player choose between them. Then player 3 can choose between the other pile from p1, or the 2 new piles from p2, etc. I suspect this will feel a lot more like ICYC, though it may be tricky to make geography matter, or else I could lose the Worker Placement aspect.

As for the latter issue, things being frustratingly difficult to do, I have a solution as well. In general terms, I had designed a lot of stuff in the game with restrictions, when I may have done better using incentives instead. For example, in the first draft you could only build the building indicated on the tile explored in its space. Therefore if you wanted to build a particular type of building, you were at the mercy of the Exploration draws. Perhaps better would be to allow any building to be built, but offer a bonus or discount when building the indicated type. That's similar to what I did in Crusaders, and the thought crossed my mind in this case as well - and now I think that's probably the way to go.

Skye Frontier

Since we only played a partial game of Division of Labor, we had time to try another game. A few weeks ago I started getting antsy to dig into one of my older designs, last played about 2 years ago at AZ Game Fair: Skye Frontier. Unfortunately, we had to cut that one short a few rounds in when my toddler awoke, and my players were running low on time anyway, but we did get a chance to feel out at least a few rounds of play. It went OK, though I started getting the impression that of the 4 actions in the game (Explore, Build, Produce, Trade), it seemed like most of the turns the player chose Explore. I'll note that when we had to stop, it was about when we were all running out of our starting cubes (it costs cubes to build tiles into play - we might have started with too many cubes by the way), so perhaps we would have started seeing some Build and Produce actions, maybe Trade too.

Maybe this is OK - I mean, it is a tile laying game... maybe it's OK if most turns consist of drawing and placing a tile? But to an extent, if that's all we're doing, then why bother with the other actions. The obvious response is that you could set up an engine, then start producing and trading or something like that. So maybe there's not a problem at all. I'd like to get through a whole game before committing to any thoughts on that.