Recent playtesting - Sails and Sorcery: some details

The last few weeks, my Saturday playtest sessions have been spent playing Michael's game, Sails and Sorcery. It's kind of a mashup of my game Eminent Domain and the area control classic El Grande.

In Sails and Sorcery you are a pirate captain, sailing your ship from island to island, recruiting and deploying pirates, building structures, and summoning monsters in an attempt to make off with the lion's share of treasure when it's found in those areas.

Michael had been working on it for a while, he talked about it on the TMG podcast last year. In October, Mike figured it was time to get my input, so he brought the prototype to town with him for Rincon, we played a few times, and he left it with me to work on.

Role Selection

Because it was based on Eminent Domain, the game had a role selection mechanism (where opponents can follow your role). Michael had noticed an issue with that however, and he had disallowed following in the last round of the game. The issue was that if I make a play -- putting pieces on the board, or moving them around -- it's really easy for other players to undo my play by simply following. Disallowing the follow in the last round didn't fix the issue in the other scoring rounds earlier in the game though.

So one thing I suggested as we played was that maybe it should not be a role selection game at all. In other words, maybe there doesn't need to be following in the game. Role selection (the lead-follow dynamic) is the entirety of the player interaction in Eminent Domain, but in this game there is interaction on the board as players vie for control of different areas by having the most pieces there. With that interaction, the role selection isn't as necessary, so we tried it without.

However, without being able to act on other players turns, we wouldn't be able to get as much accomplished. So in place of following, we just did an additional role each turn (I'm going to continue using the term "role" here to mean "thing you get to boost with other cards," even though the terminology isn't as accurate any more. "Action" simply means playing 1 card for it's effect, no boosting). This seemed to work fine, and so the first few tests I did recently continued to use 1 action and 2 roles per turn, in that order.

One of my playtesters really wanted a more flexible turn order, because frequently you want to do your 2 roles in different locations (you act in the location where your ship is located), and so he wanted to do role/action/role, using the action to move his ship. I was hesitant to try this because Michael and I had said the same thing back in October, and we tried it, and I immediately did not like the results. This was partly because the "action" part of your turn was really resolving your whole ship, which had multiple things you could do.

However, I acquiesced to try it again, but with a simplified ship such that your abilities from your ship we're more static (like role icons), so it was just the card action you would be doing "out of order." We tried it, and it wasn't too bad, but I still didn't like it, maybe because I prefer the organized turn structure.

Then that player had an additional suggestion, to replace the action with another role. Most of the actions are miniature (1-icon) versions of the role anyway, so if we didn't have actions and just did 3 roles, then a bunch of rules overhead drops out, and the turn flexibility increases without feeling too weird or out of order. In addition, we said that taking a card for the role from the stacks (another aspect based on Eminent Domain) was optional. If you did it, then you'd have an additional icon for the turn, and another card in your deck. If you didn't, then you would miss out on that icon, but you could avoid bloating your deck with the card if you wanted. You only have so many cards in your hand, so often times one of your roles will only be for 1-2 icons. In that respect, the role/role/role format isn't really all that different from action/role/role after all.

We tried this new format once, and I was skeptical. I thought it would produce too much AP, or have other issues. However the first play with that format didn't take any longer on the clock than the game we had just finished using the old format. So I'll try it again next time.

Monsters and their cost

Another aspect I've been tinkering with is the monsters in the game. Originally, you could use a build role to build a building, which gave you permanent influence in an area, and unlocked some ability (like the buildings in Crusaders), or summon a monster, which had some cool effect, but was otherwise similar to a building. Michael had envisioned pieces like in Blood Rage - large miniatures with player colored bases that you could snap on to show who had summoned the monster. You needed to know that, because often times the monster counted as influence toward scoring (just like your buildings did).

My opinion was that the monsters and buildings were too similar, so I suggested making them more different from each other. Buildings give you influence and power ups, so I thought monsters should give you some awesome immediate effect, and then stay in play with some global effect for everyone, like it or not. I liked the image of summoning a force of nature and then being unable to control it.

My first draft of the monsters was to make them the high end of the build role. For 2 or 3, you build a building. I tried the monsters costing 5 (and if you were really interested in summoning them, there's a way to get a build icon from one if your buildings). This was too high a cost, by the time we were ready to summon the monsters, the game was over. Michael wants them to see play every game, not just some of them, and not just maybe, and not just at the end. And I agree with him.

I also thought it was weird that the same resource both built you buildings and summoned monsters. So I made 2 changes... First, I separated the roles. You use build roles to place buildings for influence and abilities, and you use summon roles to summon monsters. I set the summon cost of the monsters to be 2 summon icons, plus 1 more for each time that monster has been summoned in the past. This is easily tracked by dropping a token on the monster card after you summon it.

I have iterated through a few versions of each monster, but I am now super happy with this format and the current effects of the monsters. Splitting up the resources was great, and this cost structure is perfect. The monsters all start out cheap, so they get used. Then they get more expensive over time so that in the late game it's hard to afford them if you haven't been summoning all game long.

Buildings

The monster cost structure worked so well, I wanted to try it with the buildings too. The buildings on your player board (your ship) are in 4 rows of 2 columns, and for each row you must build left to right, just like Crusaders. Originally, the buildings in the left column cost 2 build icons, and the buildings in the right column cost 3. Additionally, each area had a certain number of build spaces (usually 2 or 3), and no more than that number of buildings could be built there.

Thinking about the escalating monster cost, I tried eliminating the build limit and old cost structure, and instead tried "buildings cost 2 icons, plus 1 more for each building already in that area. This way, you can build cheaply if you spend time sailing around or get to an area first, but once there are 2 buildings in an area, you will have a hard time building there again if you haven't specialized in it a bit, either by investing in the building that gives you a build icon, or by obtaining a number of build cards into your deck.

This works well because each building also increases the value of the area for the 1st place player during scoring.

The effects you unlock from moving these buildings off of your player board have also changed a bit. Originally, some of them were static effects, such as a role icon, or a hand size increase, and some were additional actions you could do at the beginning of your turn. While it was fun to do an extra action at the beginning of your turn, it often wasn't as useful as you wanted it to be. A free deploy doesn't help if you need to recruit pirates. A free plunder doesn't help if there aren't any opponents where your ship is. This is the kind of frustration that prompted the desire for a more flexible turn structure, but it's also the reason the more flexible turn structure was problematic. The game action happens with the card play, so it made sense to me that the buildings could all be static effects rather than additional free actions. Removing the game action from there made the flexible turn structure a lot more acceptable feeling. I've been tweaking and trying different combinations of unlock abilities, but most of them are the same as they were back in October. I'm trying to make sure there are a variety of strategic paths available in the abilities, but also make sure that you aren't forced to build a certain way (or at all) in order to succeed. Like the technology in EmDo, I expect players will build at least a little each game, and if they concentrate on it, maybe they'll build a lot. I expect most players to end the game having built anywhere between 2 and 6 of the 8 buildings and still be able to be competitive.

There are a bunch of other details I've been working on, but these were some of the biggest (and most recent) changes I've tried. Perhaps I'll post again later about other aspects, such as the scoring round format :)