King Arthur's Court, playtest notes

[Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@...>]

These are the promised playtest notes for King Arthur's Court.  The
playtest session took place at Seattle Cosmic Game Night on 14
September 2002 and used the rules current at that date.  Players were
Ron H-E (me), Mark Purtill, Chad McDaniel, and Tim Schutz: a
four-player game.  I'm working from notes here, we only played it
once, and it's been more than a month since we played, so bear with
me.

Before I go into detail, I want to say how much I appreciate Phillip
Lerche's efforts to bring new game genres to the piecepack -- King
Arthur's Court is a role-choosing game like Citadels or Puerto Rico,
and Piecepack Subways is a railroad game.  Quite cool.  (What's next,
Phillip?)

*****

OK, the first thing we all did was choose a Jester as our first
Courtier; as the most versatile Courtier, it seemed a no-brainer.

Most of the problems we experienced with the game seemed to have to do
with how incredibly strong Arthur's role was.  Arthur (Mark) took a
ridiculous number of points on tiles on the first turn: 4 tiles
including the 3, 4, and 5 tiles he had just bid for the Arthur role.
As we read the rules, this was a perfectly legal thing for Arthur to
do.  Mark now had more points in tiles than anyone else, and could
easily outbid anyone.  At the end of the first round, he had the tiles
5, 4, 3, 2, 2, A.  We thought this was incredibly unbalanced; Arthur
should not be permitted to take money back that he has just added to
the King's purse.

Mark kept choosing the Arthur role, and just kept getting stronger and
stronger.  By Round 3, his tiles were as follows: 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 2, A.
He increased in strength throughout the game, and was always the
player with the most money in tiles.

At one point, I had to bid 4 (or higher, but I bid 4) and get 0 back.
Mark, who was doing well, did not think it was because I was playing
badly.  I was down to one 5 tile and yet I had 4 points and Mark, the
most powerful player, had -4.  Of course, the Lancelot role could flip
this around very easily in a chaotic way, IIRC.

Strategy was unclear, except to bid to get Arthur first, then keep
purchasing Arthur with your huge bankwad, perhaps buying Lancelot 
at the end if you needed to reverse some points.

We thought the Guenevere rules could have been explained better; the
examples in the rules should use total values for couples rather than
+1 and +2 modifiers.

Question: MUST Lancelot reverse?

We discovered there are really SIX rounds in a 4-player game.

Scores were as follows:

Mark 8
Chad 6
Ron  5
Tim  3

Consensus:

1. The Arthur role is WAY too strong.

2. In the end game, many roles become nearly worthless.

3. The game (as it was then) might not work for 4 players.

4. Needs more playtesting!

*****

I'm sorry if these playtest notes sound awfully negative, but really
there was just one big problem (Super-Arthur!) and several small ones.

I am cc'ing this to the Seattle Cosmic list; if any of the people who
participated have anything else to add, I'll pass it on, with their
permission.  (And of course Tim Schutz is a piecepack list regular.)

Finally, a note to Phillip: if you email me your piecepack Word files,
I will be happy to turn them into PDFs as I have been doing for Mark
Biggar's files, then email them back.  PDF files are more widely
readable on many different computer platforms than Microsoft Word
files are, and of course all the rules files on Piecepack.org are
PDFs.

Ron H-E

-- 
         Ron Hale-Evans ... rwhe@... & rwhe@...
           Center for Ludic Synergy, Seattle Cosmic Game Night, 
Kennexions Glass Bead Game &  Positive Revolution FAQ: http://www.ludism.org/
Home page & Hexagram-8 I Ching Mailing List: http://www.apocalypse.org/~rwhe/