Re: King Arthur's Court, playtest notes

["Benedict" <boycat_oh@...>]

--- In piecepack@y..., Ron Hale-Evans <rwhe@l...> wrote:
> 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?)


No idea, to be honest, although I have a rough idea for an 
economic game based on holding territory - a sort of empire 
builder for the piecepack.  But it is really just a tiny kernel at the 
moment.  And I need to work on refining Subways to get the rules 
balance right.  And I need to make sure that KAC is balanced.

After reading through your playtest report (and thanks very much 
for trying the game out!) I realized you were playing with version 1 
rules.

However, I will still comment on your concerns and state where 
changes have already been made.
> 
> 1. The Arthur role is WAY too strong.

The role of Arthur has been changed.  He is still fairly powerful, 
but not as harsh as before.  Now each opponent gives you 1 tile 
from his or her treasury, although he or she does not have to 
give you a tile if he or she only has one left.  The result of this is 
also that nobody ever has zero tiles which makes the rules a tiny 
bit less complex.  However, one comment I have is that choosing 
Arthur every time doesn't really get you anywhere because all he 
gains you is money tiles - and gaining courtiers is the aim of the 
game.  To some degree his power is self-limiting.  Guinevere 
has been changed for the new rules too - the person choosing 
Guin gets to take 2 courtiers instead of 1.
 
> 
> 2. In the end game, many roles become nearly worthless.

The end-game scoring (and therefore goal of the game during 
play) has been altered.  The roles held at the end all have a 
smaller value, but that value isn't likely to have any big swing 
effect.

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

Should be OK now.  The other thing i did was to add an extra role 
(so now 2 and 4 players choose 4 of 5, 3 players choose 3 of 5).

> 
> 4. Needs more playtesting!

Absolutely - and I hope some folk out there get to try the latest 
rules which provide for a very different game due to the change in 
scoring.
 
> I'm sorry if these playtest notes sound awfully negative, but 
really
> there was just one big problem (Super-Arthur!) and several 
small ones.

Nope, feedback in any form is good, I really apprciate it.

 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.

OK, I will do this once my rules for subways settle down a bit - at 
the moment they change daily based on errors/inconsistencies 
being constantly pointed out.

Thanks for all the input!
Phillip