We’re getting close to the end of the year! In January I’ll do a ‘state of the game’ update, like I did this year, but for now let’s look at what I’ve been working recently.
Development work on the heavy weapons & bigger bugs expansion has been on hold. I feel it’s more or less done, so I don’t want to finalise it before I have a clear idea of how it interacts with the other expansion content. There might be some tweaks I can include to make my life easier in other places, after all!
After the last playtesting foray, I wasn’t happy with how the equipment cards were being balanced out. I reworked some of the equipment, then put that on hold while I started figuring out how to balance them. The overall concept – using mutations to counter the equipment – seems okay, but I need to have a way for it to have a bigger impact on the game. Equally importantly, I also need it to play nicely with the other expansion content. For that reason, I did a few quick playtesting rounds of the squad leader content, just to see what might be lurking in those particular shadows.
The results of that were… interesting. It actually turned out to be fairly balanced – the troopers managed roughly a 50% win rate, which is close to ideal, and the new content was essential to that. So far, so good. Unfortunately, the bugs managed to achieve that 50% by mostly not using the content I had included for them! My playtesting notes were littered with phrases like ‘unused’, ‘unattractive’, never used’, and so on. It turns out that I had accidentally created a perverse incentive which rewarded using the new content as little as possible.
To make matters worse, the content for the bugs just isn’t much fun. There’s nothing that feels cool or exciting, which encourages you to engage with the new content, or which changes how you want to play. While it may be well-balanced in gameplay terms, I think this is not an acceptable tradeoff.
The squad leaders for the troopers are fine – they’re thematically appropriate, have useful game effects, and reward the behaviour I want the troopers to be engaging in. But the balancing content does none of those things. It should do all of them.
At this point I decided I needed to rework most of the bug content for the expansions. In terms of game mechanics, some of it is okay… but thematically, it’s a bit of a dead loss. I think I need to come up with a more integrated concept for how it all works, and then divide that across the expansions. I’m pleased to report that process is well underway, and although more work is needed I’m confident that the obstacles can be overcome.
This whole experience was something of an eye-opener for me. It’s easy for me to lose sight of the fact that this is a game with two sets of players, and that both sets need to get cool stuff for the game as a whole to be good. Treating the bugs as just part of the environment does them a severe disservice, and while I don’t want to humanise them – not that I really can, they’re alien arthropods! – I do think they deserve a bit more character.
Encounter Table Games 