Productive weekend. In addition to completing the full advantage and disadvantage section for Malevolent Domain, I've also run three play tests of Agents of SECTOR. The game is coming along nicely, in my opinion. I thought I'd share some of the results of those play tests. I have made several changes to the game, some of which were pretty fundamentally different than originally designed. Yay for play testing!
1. Removed "merit" micro-cards from the game and instead added a merit-point track on the time tracker card. Reduced cost for the game by 4 dollars, and so far nobody has had an incredibly high in-game merit point accumulation anyway.
2. Replaced "starting player card" with a "starting player token" which is nothing but a little yellow wood disk token. Did this because the starting player card was a micro card and I no longer have those in the game.
3. Changed how directives and shady deals are played - you now play them to the table, play a spy on them. During end of turn activities you discard the directives but not the shady deals, which are persistent once played. Added text "discard after use" to the directives, since they're the only card in the game that isn't persistent. This helped track actions during the game and made everything run smoother.
4. Made it so that when you play an action from your resource hand you get the benefit of the action as well. Previously, you just brought it into play but didn't get any immediate benefit from it. This is more fun.
5. Reduced the number of "actions" in the mission deck by half. They came up far too often and almost always end up filling the queue, resulting in a turn or two of no missions. Further playtest is needed, I might end up removing these action cards from the mission queue altogether or inserting a rule that says "during end of turn activities, whenever your mission queue is completely filled with actions you sweep them all to the mission discard pile and replace them all with a fresh queue." Not sure yet. Need more testing.
6. Changed how missions are worked. Now, you demonstrate you can afford the mission card then drag it over near your portfolio card and play a spy on it. But you don't pay yet. At the end of the turn activities, you pay costs for any missions you are working. This really makes the game more fun. Players can, if they wish, try to prevent you from succeeding in the mission. This makes you ponder whether or not you want to grab a mission early in the turn with your first spy placement and risk other players having too much time to react, or wait to do so on your final spy placement and risk missing out on a good mission. I might need to make some new actions and/or directives to accommodate this more cut-throat style of game play possibility.
7. Oh yeah, and changed the term "secret agent" to "spy" since that's what everyone is calling them anyway during the game.
I attached the low-resolution copy of the work-in-progress instruction book (press-quality is >250MB), hope you find some typos I didn't!
Attachment | Size |
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AgentsOfSECTOR_lowres.pdf | 759.29 KB |
Question: Is there a "mission queue" for each player or just one for all players?
To be more family friendly, you might replace the word "queue" with "draw pile".
Also, if I understood it correctly, where it says, "refill the queue," maybe it would be better as "take a number of missions from the mission deck equal to the number you took from the draw pile and put them on the bottom of the mission draw pile."
It's just one mission queue for the entire table. Yeah, I went into more detail on the mission queue on the last page, showing how to handle when a mission is accomplished from it, and how to handle the end of turn activities. I'll make a page reference in the spot you mention (for an example, see page 12) -- would that work?
"queue" is a fairly technical term I suppose, but it's not exactly a draw pile, it's a queue lol. It's a line of cards in a FIFO stack... or an order of aging chronological progression lol... I dunno. I guess I'll wait and see more opinions from play testing before I make choices/changes to the "queue" name.
I'm going to download tabletop simulator via steam tonight and see if it's possible to build up this game, then I can have play tests with folks and friends I can't normally sit at a table with.
I get it now. Thanks.
Is this a card game?
Is this a card game?
Daddy,
If you go to Bills Google+ site you can see the game layout there. Though there is a major card component to the game there is also some worker placement aspects to it as well.
Mark M.