I enjoyed this - when we played it I think we missed the strategy around placing the search tokens (or whatever they were called) until it was too late - so I spent much of the late game taking research for 3 points then picking my research card back up.
It felt like maybe there was an issue where it was pretty optimal to put down a token and then dig it up on the next turn - and nobody else can move and dig quickly enough to stop that. But if we were using those tokens more strategically that might be less of an issue.
The tabletop sim mod could do with a little work (correct hands for the player colours, hidden areas for use during setup, maybe a bag with the tiles in to randomly distribute them, etc.) but great job getting this together as it made it much easier for us to play :)
The design of the game is great - everything looks cohesive and it's attractive to look at.
There's a few kind of vague bits in the rulebook - the main one i remember are the rule about digging in your own site (which makes it sound like maybe you need the cards to dig in anybody's site) but in general it's clear.
Nobody did research from someone else's hand in our game - what do you see the purpose of that being?
Maybe some of it could be streamlined - it feels like there's quite a big rules explanation for phase 1 when actually there's not so many things to do there - so that could be looked at. Once we got it though it moved very quickly and we enjoyed it.
Yeah, polishing the rulebook was a pretty last-minute thing so I'm sure that things could be explained better. That's probably Phase 1 is explained better than Phase 2, because we ran out of time! We playtested this way more than we have playtested any game in the past, so I suspect that we didn't explain things perfectly because we were already confident in how to play and had had to do a lot of balancing/tweaking. We'll take it away and look at it :)
In our playtests, we found that it was much more efficient to put the survey tokens down and leave them there (rather than digging up straight away) because they're worth more points at the end of the game and you can then move on to try and dig something different up - but good to get feedback from people that have played it differently.
Personally, I never took some else's research cards (and preferred to take from the table) but the other fellas used the "steal" more effectively to pinch cards that would stop someone solo-finding a Relic, or which you suspect might be one that you need to complete a set. It becomes useful particularly late-game because you might be able to work out who has the matching card that you're missing, or to stop triggering the final round(s).
Either way, useful feedback - cheers. It's by far the most complex jam game I've/we've made before, so still really proud of it!
Comments
Your time estimate of 1 hour is very accurate!
I enjoyed this - when we played it I think we missed the strategy around placing the search tokens (or whatever they were called) until it was too late - so I spent much of the late game taking research for 3 points then picking my research card back up.
It felt like maybe there was an issue where it was pretty optimal to put down a token and then dig it up on the next turn - and nobody else can move and dig quickly enough to stop that. But if we were using those tokens more strategically that might be less of an issue.
The tabletop sim mod could do with a little work (correct hands for the player colours, hidden areas for use during setup, maybe a bag with the tiles in to randomly distribute them, etc.) but great job getting this together as it made it much easier for us to play :)
The design of the game is great - everything looks cohesive and it's attractive to look at.
There's a few kind of vague bits in the rulebook - the main one i remember are the rule about digging in your own site (which makes it sound like maybe you need the cards to dig in anybody's site) but in
general it's clear.
Nobody did research from someone else's hand in our game - what do you see the purpose of that being?
Maybe some of it could be streamlined - it feels like there's quite a big rules explanation for phase 1 when actually there's not so many things to do there - so that could be looked at. Once we got it though it moved very quickly and we enjoyed it.
Great job :)
Yeah, polishing the rulebook was a pretty last-minute thing so I'm sure that things could be explained better. That's probably Phase 1 is explained better than Phase 2, because we ran out of time! We playtested this way more than we have playtested any game in the past, so I suspect that we didn't explain things perfectly because we were already confident in how to play and had had to do a lot of balancing/tweaking. We'll take it away and look at it :)
In our playtests, we found that it was much more efficient to put the survey tokens down and leave them there (rather than digging up straight away) because they're worth more points at the end of the game and you can then move on to try and dig something different up - but good to get feedback from people that have played it differently.
Personally, I never took some else's research cards (and preferred to take from the table) but the other fellas used the "steal" more effectively to pinch cards that would stop someone solo-finding a Relic, or which you suspect might be one that you need to complete a set. It becomes useful particularly late-game because you might be able to work out who has the matching card that you're missing, or to stop triggering the final round(s).
Either way, useful feedback - cheers. It's by far the most complex jam game I've/we've made before, so still really proud of it!