Current (and recent) designs and where they stand - revisited

I seem to have lost the patience to sit down and write blog posts about my games, which is kinda too bad because this blog is probably my best record of the history and status of all my designs -- or it was when I would post in it! Now everything's piecemeal, spread out between various Discord channels (and servers)...

About a month ago I posted about the current status of a few current/recent designs. I've actually missed several playtest sessions since then, so not a ton has happened, and yet I do feel like I have updates, and frankly I hope that by revisiting them, I'll keep the designs active in my mind. Fingers crossed that works!

Colony Collapse

My co-design with Aurore Inara from the Decision Space Discord, Colony Collapse has made great strides through the couple dozen playtests we've done since the first attempt in June. I actually think this game is pretty close to something we could call done. What do they say? 80% down, 80% to go?

The latest changes (since the last blog post) are as follows:

* No more turn order track. Aurore was pretty strongly against the turn order track for some time, but I was holding onto it for dear life! Well, at this point I have let go -- now we have a 1st player marker that passes each round, and it's not so bad. I still like the idea of investing in turn order, but it's possible there's not really enough turns to justify spending actions on it. And to be honest, some of the priority tension has been removed from the game, so it's a little less useful than I used to think it was anyway.

* Rally action - pawn on the board. "Rallying" a tile means claiming control of it as long as your position on its issue track is higher than the current controller (and non-negative). I was skeptical of this whole idea at first, but I think it actually works really well. Importantly, it has opened up the game so that it's not just all about going up the issue tracks (as it had been in earlier iterations). Now it behooves you to go up issue tracks in order to control unclaimed tiles as they come into play, but with the Develop action you can rally tiles in the display, before they come into play, and with the Dance action you can rally tiles that are in play (gaining control of unclaimed ones, or wresting control from a player who is lower on the track than you are) -- but you have to do it. And since your Rally range depends on your pawn's location, it's not trivial to claim control of tiles, even if you are ahead on their issue track... but you can do it. This dynamic makes the game, I think. before it was just a matter of getting every track bump you could get. Now that's not as necessary.

* Rondel display rather than static one. Originally, the actions that interacted with the display were like "take the up-to-Nth tile from the left," so a stronger action would give you more options by letting you "reach" deeper into the display. Now it's a little rondel instead, and you move the (shared) rondel pawn up to N spaces. One down-side to this is that later turn order players may have a hard time planning for rondel moves because it makes a big difference if someone moves the pawn before you do or not. So far that doesn't seem to be a dealbreaker, but it might be wise to give each player their own rondel pawn or something.

* No more card display. Now you just draw N cards, choose 1. It's a lot less info to track, and the stronger the action, the more options you get to choose from. It's a little less strategic, but it's smoother and simpler.

* Up-and-Down track bumps. After some disappointing feeling playtests where one player just dominated all the tracks, we experimented with a format where every bump up an issue track comes with a bump down another track. This way you can, by definition, only dominate 1/2 the tracks, and that means other players will be ahead on the other tracks, for a more dynamic game feel. This was very interesting, and we've iterated to the following: The bump + Flip action just goes up a track. The card action allows you to go up one of the indicated tracks and down the other. The Invest action lets you go down up to N times on a track to go up that many times on an adjacent track. I think this is a pretty interesting format, though I might prefer if the card action just went up one of the tracks and not down the other because it seems like a lot of the time that makes it undesirable to use.

Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans

No change here! I'll leave this from last time for reference:

Before I got started on Colony Collapse, I had revived another of my old designs: Joan of Arc: Maid of Orleans. I finally tried a proof of concept of some dynamics I'd wanted to add a decade ago...
* Arrival Effects on the board spaces, so you have reason to move places
* Increase battle costs
* Add training track status to the goals
* Add a geographic element to the goals

Some of that seemed like a step in the right direction, but it all still needed work. unfortunately, the game got set aside at that point. Hopefully I'll remember everything the next time I get the game to the table!

Division of Labor

As I mentioned last time, the biggest issue with this game is downtime. After that first attempt at a roundless structure with Rick, I tried a few other versions or configurations. In some ways they showed promise, but in other ways they were disappointing. The most promising format that I tried might have been as follows:

At the start of your turn, there would be 1 worker pawn in play belonging to the previous player. First you would place your worker pawn at another island space, then you'd split the cubes at the opponent's pawn's space and take a turn. So you split the cubes, they choose a pile and take those cubes into their hand (and take the associated penalties), then you take your penalties and resolve one action with strength depending on how many cubes you have of that color. Finally, you discard all of your cubes of that color, whether you needed them all or not. Then the next player goes, and they'll split with you.

One immediate issue with this is that doing only 1 action per split means you get 1/2 as much done for the same amount of penalties... but that's easily fixed by ~doubling the penalty tracks 

Another issue a player brought up is that this felt less like splitting actions and more like splitting resources -- and I can see that. However, if the cubes are tight enough, then I think it could work out to be close enough.

It was a little wonky to do all that stuff in one turn... first you have to think about what cubes you might want later, then you have to make an unrelated Split decision, and your action may or may not be related to the cubes you just got in the split. The next time I play I think a better turn sequence might be to Split first, then act (maybe with the cubes you just received), then place your worker (thinking about the future). It'll be obvious which space you were just at, as there won't be cubes there, so you probably have to place elsewhere, then to cap off your turn, recharge the empty space with cubes.

I might miss doing 2 actions at a time (I usually prefer that in games), but I do kinda like the idea of your cubes building up until you use them. I'd like to play a bit more and see if it grows on me.

NEW IDEA! As I typed this, I had a thought... what if the ship movement was done by the CHOOSING player, rather than the active player, who already has several things to do during the turn? It could be that after taking the cubes (and penalties), you can Sail your ship to any space represented in your pile -- or maybe you could do it cube by cube, so if things line up right you could potentially sail a few spaces at once!