The kids had been put to bed, and were sleeping peacefully, all was quiet and calm in the house. However, downstairs, on the dining table, a battle was about to commence….
My wife, she will be the first to say, is not a board game “fan”. Don’t get me wrong, she enjoys games, get her involved in a game of hungry hungry hippos and she may well take your fingers off in the heat of the match. Connect 4, ker-plunk, naught and crosses, she’s a champ, but getting her to sit and play a strategy war game was, I thought, going to be a tall order.
I’m very glad to say I was wrong. Not only did she agree to help me playtest DarkStar Tactics, she stayed engaged throughout the roughly 90 minutes, actively enjoyed it, and, ended up wiping the floor with me at literally my own game.
When playtesting the game, I needed to find out a few things. Is it balanced? how long will a game take, are there any glaring errors with cards/figures the map, etc. But the biggest question was always going to be “is it fun?”.
The journey to Version 0.1*
In my first ever playthrough with my son on what we will call Darkstar Tactics v0.01, We noticed straight away that the board was way too big. both physically (we will get on to that) and in terms of movement. By the time our characters had made it into combat with each other we were already on round 3 of movement, realistic? maybe Fun? probably not.
So we tried doubling the move stat for the rest of the game, which seemed to fix that issue (minus some minor balancing and tweaking).
The next issue was the physical size of the game board. The original idea for the game used modular board tiles, so players could arrange them in different ways, however, after playing with them we noticed a couple of issues, e.g. the boards didn’t “fit” together well on our “rustic” table, and it barely fit it was so large. The other issue was that in “theory” you could rearrange the tiles, but in practice there were only a handful of layouts that actually made sense. so we abandoned that idea and went for a more traditional fold out board.
We also decided to reduce the scale of the minis and tiles from 32mm to 25mm, again in order to keep the board a more suitable size for most peoples gaming/dining/coffee tables.
The Husband Vs Wife Showdown.
So back to the playtest. New board, new minis, custom laser cut dice (see my other blog post about those). We were ready to start the stopwatch and see what happened.
The first test was if she could grasp the rules (bearing in mind I haven’t got a rulebook printed), but after a couple of moves she got it. Success. Keeping the CORE rules simple really helps with “inexperienced” board game players.. Ill start testing with the ADVANCD rules when im happy the core game is sorted.
Increasing the distances each model moved worked quite well, by the end of the first round, all the units had an idea of which direction they were going to head, but no line of sight for battles just yet. Round 2, and the first possibilities of a firefight started, a good chance to try the dice out, a couple of hits, a couple of blocks, a few misses. not bad. I had adjusted the max health of some of the units, the last playthrough dragged a little due to some overpowered characters having way too many hit points.
The first Casualty was my Commander, slain on his way to an objective by a lucky sniper and commander combo attack (the commanders special ability making an appearance early. After a few more rounds, the board was quite well split, with 3 distinct battle zones appearing around each objective.
Some units were utilising the Cover, others were contesting the objectives in a tug-of-war. Roll after roll, each specialist was using special abilities, ranged, melee, every possible attack vector was being utilised by both sides.
Then we entered the “endgame”. slowly more and more specialists were being removed from the board, freeing up other units to assist in other areas. a mad dash from the sides to the centre objective by the Orange team, followed by a one on one between my Close combat Assault specialist and the Orange commander (which on paper i should have won). Unfortunately the dice were not on my side and my assault guy just could not land a hit.
Game Over
With that, the Purple team (me) held just one objective, but the Orange Team held 2. The winner, well it wasn’t me.
Stopped the stopwatch, 1 hour 27 minutes. perfect amount of time for a first game i think, if i can keep the core game between 60 and 90 minutes i think thats a “good” amount of time to keep things interesting and most of all, fun.
More playtests to come