11 more days until Ducosim rolls around! It’s been a while since I’ve managed to slot in a playtest session, but yesterday I finally found an opportunity! Today I compiled the three playtests for version 22 and took another step forward, giving me the version I will be playtesting at the convention.
Want to try it out? Check out Upcoming Events to find more details about Ducosim and other events I will be at later.
If you’re interested in the changes I made ahead of time, you can read about them below. Spoiler warning!
Read more: Version 23I was pretty happy about the introduction of Activity, so I can force players to keep up the pace or get overwhelmed with Activity. I am pleased to say that the playtests proved this system worked as intended.
As happens when you tackle a major issue, fixing this problem brought a bunch of other problems to light.
The biggest problem was that though you now feel the pressure of the game rolling towards a loss, there is not much you can do to push for a win. Finding clues and equipment is random, and twice I’ve had that the game played out until the final Search Token gave either the last clue or the last piece of equipment.
That’s why this next version updates all pieces of equipment, giving them game effects outside of collecting and identifying clues. This means that no equipment is useless and opens the door for more choices being made once most of the clues and equipment have already been found. This will also allow the players to scale as the game scales, reducing the overall difficulty. In theory.
Next to that, there were some unresolved points of feedback from the last Ducosim I attended. Since Ducosim is the best proving ground for changes, I have chucked those into this version. This means that the doors system gets dropped in favor of giving each room a predefined entrance. To prevent deadlocks, rooms that block off part of the basement will be replaced by generic 4-way tiles. And dead ends are removed entirely to counterbalance the lack of doors.
And I’ve introduced the ability to trade items with one other player in your current room, which is an alternative to picking up and dropping items. I doubt this will have a big impact on balance, but it should provide a clean way to exchange equipment with other players.
All that’s left is to create a large batch of new components, since both the tiles and equipments need to be updated, and the player boards and marketing banner are due for a refresher too. So I’m far from being ready, but it should make for some pretty new pieces!
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